Best Practices to Improve your Success on Steam
When Valve released Steam in 2003, it was mainly a distribution tool for Half-Life 2 to transfer game updates and patches easier to a broad customer base across multiple regions and time zones. In 2005, Steam opened its doors for third-party publishers, and since then, it became the leading digital store for PC games. Despite the increase of competition during recent years, especially the Epic Games store launch, Steam remained the number one digital marketplace for PC games.
Every week approximately 150–200 new games are released on Steam. This makes the discoverability of new games on Steam a significant challenge, especially for indie developers with limited budgets. Therefore, it is crucial to follow best practices to make your Steam Store page more appealing for potential customers and convert them to wishlist your game on Steam.
Excellent articles about Steam do already exist. Therefore, I will keep my observations of the best practices high-level and provide links to the reports that give an in-depth feature of Steam’s specific topic.
The Steam Store will be the first thing that most people focus on, but what’s far more critical is that Steam is a massive community of PC gamers. Not all gamers might engage within this community, but millions do, and it is crucial to keep this in mind for all your marketing efforts.
Your Steam page should go live as soon as you announce your game, even if this is a year or more before the actual release. You don’t want to lose a single customer preordering (wishlisting) your title.
It’s OK to start with a basic set of assets, as you can continually update the store page to keep it fresh. Your Steam store page should always be up-to-date and feature the newest assets towards game release.
Even if you don’t publish a plethora of content on your store page initially, your strategy and focus need to be clear. What’s the key message a potential customer should take away? What makes your game unique? How can you make the main features most appealing?
This GamesIndustry.biz article by Marie Dealessandri lets developers share their best practices on how to build a Steam page that genuinely stands out: https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2020-04-29-how-to-get-the-most-out-of-your-games-steam-page
Once your Steam Store page is online, focus on building a community for your game. Steam communities often surpass communities on other platforms, but ideally, you should use all viable platforms and services and cross-promote everywhere. Just make sure that the Steam community isn’t an afterthought and part of your social media and community marketing plan.
Steam events have become a popular marketing tool to raise awareness, especially for unreleased games. Michael Napora takes a deep dive into the marketing potential of events on Steam in this article at gamesindustry.biz: https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2020-04-20-how-events-being-featured-on-steam-are-changing-games-marketing
The Steam Game Festival is a top-rated event on Steam that allows unpublished games (only games that have not released a playable build yet are eligible) to participate in a promotion on Steam, to showcase new game content via livestream, playable demo, or prologue.
The Steam Game Festival has grown considerably within the last year. The last festival, which took place from the 3rd to the 9th of February, featured over 500 playable demos. Therefore, it is critical to align your marketing activities to promote your game at the Steam Game Festival to create user engagement and stand out among the competition.
Success at Steam events will lead to positive growth of followers and wishlists. After all, wishlists are the key performance indicator on Steam.
If you want to dive deeper into the topic of wishlists on Steam, I recommend checking out the following articles:
The Indiewolverine website run by Logan Williams contains an excellent guide about Steam wishlists: https://indiewolverine.com/steam-wishlists-guide/
GameDiscoverCo founder Colin Carless looks into the ratio of Steam followers to wishlists over here: https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/SimonCarless/20210211/377348/Call_for_data_your_Steam_wishlist_to_follower_ratio.php
And Marie Dealessandri provides another article about Steam wishlists featuring developers’ feedback on gamesindustry.biz:
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2020-05-15-a-game-developer-guide-to-steam-wishlists
I also highly recommend thoroughly reading the Steamworks marketing documentation, which provides best practices and the platform’s latest updates. Game marketing and Steam keep evolving, and it’s easy to miss some of the critical features that Steam provides for marketing. To fully leverage all the fantastic opportunities that Steam offers as a platform, a clear understanding of it is essential.
I could only highlight some of the best practices for marketing on Steam in this article, but if you also follow the advice provided in the linked articles and the resources that Steam offers, your marketing on Steam will surely leap forward.