At the start of 2024 I decided that every Quarter I would check in to see what games are doing well, how many games are releasing, and what it says about finding success on Steam. I also take a moment to single out games that have earned more than 1000 Continue Reading
What Jonas Tyroller’s Games reveal about the Steam Algorithm
Which matters more: The game or the marketing? Popular gamedev YouTube personality Jonas Tyroller recently released a video where he argued that the most important factor in your game’s success is whether the game is “good” and that “marketing” is not as important. His argument is that if you have Continue Reading
You don’t need to be an extrovert to be good at marketing
I hear this all the time from indie developers “I love the game making part of being a game developer, but absolutely suck at the marketing part because I have crippling social anxiety.” Somewhere around the social media boom of the 2010s people started concluding that social media = marketing. Continue Reading
Launching during a big Store event
How would you like over 3,000,000 impressions on your game every day for 2 weeks? The developers of Eden Crafters managed to get this for the launch of their prologue using “One Weird Trick (TM)”: they launched during the Steam Summer Sale. Typically everyone advises against doing any big promotional Continue Reading
Success after a slow EA launch, the Terminus story
Terminus: Zombie Survivors recently emerged from Early Access (EA) to 1.0. Look at this review chart for the game. When Terminus had its original EA launch in April of 2021, it didn’t look like it would be a hit. The game only had 15 reviews in its first month and Continue Reading
The EA Success of Nova Drift
On August 12, Jeffrey “Chimeric” Nielson launched the 1.0 version of the top down SHMUP roguelite Nova Drift. Over 10 years of development with 5 years in EA, the game has sold nearly 400,000 copies on Steam alone. Even more than 400K when you factor in itch, gog, humble, streamer Continue Reading
How to cross promote under the new Steam Rules
As I wrote in my last blog post, Valve will remove all URLs that are embedded in your game’s Steam page. Valve’s aim is to declutter Steam pages that are no longer about the game itself. For the most part, this is a very good, proactive move. It keeps Steam Continue Reading
Valve just took away a valuable visibility tool
Last week Valve outlawed excessive cross promotion and other visual noise from Steam store pages. Here is their official blog post announcing this change. I am not sure this is a great idea. In today’s post I will look at what they are changing and why I don’t think this Continue Reading
Big in Japan
Twitter still works in Japan Strangely, Japan still loves Twitter. They also love reading blogs about games! I love Japan. If you look at stats you will see Japan is the #2 user of the site. If you do the math that means the number of accounts is about 50% Continue Reading
What Steam’s big demo update means for your marketing strategy
Valve just radically changed the behavior of demos. You can read all about it here. The TL;DR of the changes are as follows: This is the button that launches the emails: So how does this change your marketing strategy? Should you launch your demo when you launch your Steam page? Continue Reading