This guide will talk about how to market your game to aim for financial success on Steam. There’s a lot to cover, so I’ll try to keep it short and concise.
Game idea
The most important marketing factor in your game’s success is making a game people want to play. This makes promotion a lot easier. Other factors in this article could double your revenue, but picking the right game can 100x it.
The bad news is that it’s nearly impossible to know if your game idea is worth making beforehand. There are two techniques to try to work around this.
Market research
By looking at other games’ financial performance, we can try to guess how our game will do. I use SteamDB to check games by genre, and Gamalytic to check revenue estimates. A good rule of thumb is that a game will sell 50 times as many copies as it has reviews, and that your revenue is about 55% of Steam’s gross revenue (~20% goes to refunds and taxes, 30% to Steam).
This isn’t an exact science, but it can be useful to look at averages by category (genre, theme, …), and also to look at existing games that are most similar to yours (although be wary of survivorship bias).
Additionally, reading reviews from similar games can help you understand why some games did so well or what you can improve.
Finally, this can only help if your idea is similar to existing games, and isn’t very useful for very innovative games.
Idea validation
Validating the appeal of your ideas before fully committing to them will mitigate your risk. You want to share your game idea and gauge the public’s reaction to try to infer how the game would perform. There are many approaches with different commitment levels:
- Talking about the idea with strangers (friends and family tend not to be useful since they don’t want to offend you, and probably won’t be your target player)
- Screenshots and trailers on social media
- Game jams
- Prototypes on itch.io (or even a free game on Steam)
- Publishers and crowdfunding (getting funded completely de-risks the project)
Most of these approaches aren’t perfect in either way. Some games may fail validation but end up succeeding (my first game The Ouroboros King only had 500WL a month before launch, but has sold over 30k copies).
Pre-release
Before releasing a game, you’ll want to create a Steam page and gather as many wishlists (WL) as you can to make sure your launch is a success. You should also get players to your Discord who can help you playtest the game and give feedback.
Steam page
You want your Steam page to be appealing to your target audience. Explain what they will do when playing your game and why they should wishlist/buy it. Looking at the pages of similar, successful games can help you make yours.
The main assets you’ll need are: Trailer, capsule image, screenshots (show variety), short description, long description, and tags. Hire professionals for the trailer and capsule image if you can.
If you’re considering translating your game, translate the Steam page as soon as possible. This can help you make the final decision on translation.
Having a demo will help gather wishlists (especially if you get streamers to play it).
Local publishers
Some markets are hard to reach from the West (especially China), and having a local publisher can help. They usually take care of localization and local marketing, and take about a ~50% local revenue cut in exchange.
I’ve worked with Chinese local publishers for both of my games (Hawthorn and Gamersky), and they have increased my sales in the region. However, be aware that Chinese players tend to leave worse reviews than English-speaking players, which can hurt your rating and sales (my game Gods vs Horrors has a 96% positive rating for English and 68% for simplified Chinese).
Marketing beats
It is generally better for the Steam algorithm to get a big spike of traffic, rather than a slow trickle.
You want to condense your promotion around marketing beats, such as launching your Steam page, opening a playtest, releasing a demo, participating in Steam Next Fest (you really should!), and releasing the full game.
On those beats, you should send keys to streamers (if you have a demo for them to play) and maybe send a press release (I personally never had much success with this). To make your game more appealing to streamers and players, you can update the demo around those events.
I’ve written extensively about finding streamers for your game, composing emails to send them, and how it’s generally not worth spending money on streamer sponsorships.
Steam festivals
Steam festivals can be a good source of traffic. There are Steam-organized festivals, and 3rd party-organized ones (it’s important that they have front-page featuring). Here’s a link to a list of festivals, you should probably apply to as many as you can.
Nowadays, festivals are overcrowded, and the top promotion spots are usually filled with very popular games, but you can still get a small wishlist bump. If you time a marketing beat before the festival and have good WL inertia, you could do better.
Social media
Promoting Steam games on social media is hard and not worth the time investment for most games. The exceptions are games with stunning visuals or attention-grabbing hooks.
If you want to spend time on this, the best platforms are those that don’t require you to have a previous audience (unless you already have a big audience!), like TikTok, YT shorts and Reddit.
Game release
Lots of people talk about the magic number of 7k WL to target before release. The reason behind this is that it will make your game appear on the Popular Upcoming widget on Steam (which will get you about 2k extra WL in my experience). Additionally, this is enough volume for Steam to give you more traffic if your game is performing well, with the New & Trending widget and the Discovery queue.
2-3 weeks before release, you should’ve sent keys to streamers (at least 100), and now just pray they will play the game.
Finally, you should encourage your players to leave reviews, as getting to 10 reviews may enable participation on certain Steam widgets.
Post-release
After release, you should still do a bit of promotion around game updates (they have little impact on sales unless some streamer picks up the game again).
However, the most important action you can take now is look for deals.
Discounts
Steam is very discount-centric, so try to discount at any opportunity you have, as it’ll bring a sales spike. I’m not sure what the optimal strategy is, but I try to make every discount 1-2% higher than the last.
Bundles
You can bundle before release, and I suggest you do, as it makes your game look more legit and helps other games. But the biggest impact is when a game releases and it bundles with your game, as this will bring a sales spike.
I usually scout for upcoming similar games and try to play the demo and give feedback to the devs. If I like the game, I’ll propose to bundle.
Daily Deal
If your game is successful enough (>100k$ revenue), you may qualify for a Daily Deal on Steam. It may be offered to you, but you should ask for it (via Steam support) if you think you have a chance. Try to make your case and convince them (talk about upcoming updates, good reviews, what discount you’re ready to make, …). You can ask multiple times (maybe wait 6 months between them). I was personally denied the 1st time I asked, but accepted the 2nd time.
High-discount bundles
When you reach about a 50% discount on Steam, it may be time to go to big-discount bundle sites like Humble Bundle and Fanatical.
They tend to buy lots of keys at a big discount (~90%), so it’s a good opportunity for extra cash.