Today I wanted to share with you the inspiring story of how the developer of Kingdom Workshop methodically updated his Steam page’s tags and capsule art to improve from a meager 5-wishlists-a-day to a healthy 20-a-day. Look at this graph of his game’s wishlist history during 2020. Can you see Continue Reading

In October Steam hosted its second festival featuring unreleased games. You can still see the page here. I reached out to as many developers who appeared in the festival to see if they would share their numbers with me with the goal of understanding how the festival does in promoting Continue Reading

A good Steam page is not necessary to have a hit game. I look at hundreds of Steam pages and I have to tell you that AAA, or big studio games usually have the least optimized pages: wrong tags, boring short descriptions, long long long trailers and screenshots that are Continue Reading

Last week I talked about tagging procedures on Steam (See Steam 101: How to Tag Your Game). Tagging is hard. I have found cases where well meaning indie devs incorrectly tag their game and inadvertent opt their game into a very selective subculture like some clueless tourist committing a faux-pas Continue Reading

Today I want to cover something that people who are new to Steam often have a problem with: Tags. If you have a couple games on Steam this post might be a bit basic but stick around because there are always little tricks that are worth reviewing. Why bother? What Continue Reading

Elections are just giant, (thankfully) temporary marketing campaigns. When I was 22 I got my first exposure to marketing when I served a minor role on an insignificant state-wide campaign in Arizona. The position was minor but I learned a lot and I figure this year’s election would be a Continue Reading

Making a capsule that accurately captures the mood and feeling of your game and yet also attracts players is a very tricky thing. It is my belief that your capsule should be interesting but also should have subtle clues that signal players as to your game’s genre. If you look Continue Reading

NOTE: This article has been updated. This one is still important to read, but you can find even more details and more information in the 2022 version of this study: What Genres Are Popular on Steam in 2022. One of the findings from the Summer Festival (which I wrote up Continue Reading

After your game launches on Steam there is a strange cyclical sales behavior that emerges. Every 8 weeks you can put your game on sale. When you do it triggers an email to everyone who wishlisted your game, which causes some of them to buy it. All those new purchases Continue Reading

On Steam you can broadcast video of your game live to your Steam page. It seems to be very effective in attracting viewers and increasing the number of wishlists In June I collected data on how many wishlists people got during the Steam Summer Festival. I asked participants whether they Continue Reading