Valve just rolled out a new and improved search. Here are some cool things I found about it 🧵 First, your studio name can now show up in search results. This is awesome! HOWEVER, you must setup your creator homepage for it to show up. So many studios forget to do this and it makes me cry. DO IT RIGHT NOW. Here are instructions on how: partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/crea…

I'll be honest: I don't get TikTok. It just seems so random, so weird. But it does work! Indie Devs do get thousands of wishlists when a TikTok blows up. So I asked @EhJaredJ to explain it to me. He managed the Cult of The Lamb socials and did this to it: He also made this viral TikTok that got 2M views. I don't know how he does it! tiktok.com/@cultofthelamb…

This week I presented my research about the trends on the Steam marketplace and the finding that surprised me the most was that I realized every game developer at some time in their career should make a horror game. Here is why ⬇️⬇️💀☠️ That graph shows that if you look at the top 500 games released in 2022, the genre with the most representation was Horror at 31. Steam players really like to be scared! And, good for us, as soon as they finish one, they buy another one, and another....

Yesterday I did my live talk on the 2022 Steam Year in Review. A lot of people had questions about this chart where I looked at what were the most popular genres among the top 2% of games. Here were some thoughts on this: 🧵🧵 By raw numbers Horror is tops. 31 horror games earned at least 1000 reviews last year. People LOVE horror! Next 4 most popular genres are single player shooters (FPS and 3rdPerson), RPGs, and Simulation, finally NSFW games.

12,000+ indie games were released on Steam in 2022. If you prove that your game is hot, the algo starts putting you in prime spots like the Discovery Queue and More Like This. So how many games get this treatment every year? 550ish and it isnt growing. Let me explain 🧵 I have worked with a lot of indies and I find that if a game doesn't convert well enough, Steam stops promoting it. I have seen lots of good games stall out with 200-300ish reviews. But the ones that convert really well get special featuring.

One of the most frustrating things about Steam is that you can earn lots of very positive reviews but your sales stall and steam stops showing it and you are wondering why why why? I have no negative reviews! All positive. Show my game to customers Steam! Here's why 🧵👇 In this Q&A one of the managers said this "[sales] create a surge of people buying your game and Steam interprets that as a really big demonstrated interest in your game and it’s more likely to show up ... as recommendations "

Apparently twitter is going down so let me make a plea that instead of going to some other social media network like Mastodon, Tumblr, Discord, or Cohost you instead start a regular blog on a website you own the domain for + a newsletter. Please, please do it. Let me explain why. #1 Tweeting is like writing in the sand moments before a wave crashes in front of it. BUT on my blog a post I wrote 9 months ago is still getting read every single day. I am not doing anything to promote it, that just happens.

Dome Keeper is a game that grossed $1 mil within the first week of its launch. It seems impossible and unattainable. I interviewed the developers @BippinBits and @garnettlee from Raw Fury about how they pulled it off. Here are 7 actions they took that helped them get here. #1 Learn game design (not by watching GDC videos) but by releasing small games. Over five years @BippinBits did game jams and published over 14 games. You can play all of them here: bippinbits.itch.io

The community manager over at @PrismatikaGames shared this really great survey of games journalists about how they like us to pitch them games biggamesmachine.com/game-journalis… Here are the most interesting findings.... 1/ Journalists favorite way to find a story is through a direct pitch by the actual developer or publisher. 3rd best is from a PR agency: /2

Your game's first 10 reviews are the most important. Look at this: it's what happens to your game’s visibility after 10 reviews. They don’t even need to be 100% positive, just from people who have purchased it (free keys don’t count.) Here is why & what you can do about it 👇👇 WHY? Valve listened to us complaining about shovelware asset flips junking up the store! SOO. they set a threshold where newly released games get 0 visibility until they get 10 reviews. It worked and effectively smothers shovelware because they never get reviews.

When you launch your "coming soon" steam page you seem to get some free visibility and wishlists. But how many WL are normal? What is bad performance? What is super good? Lets examine this in this thread so you can compare your game 🧵🧵👇👇 I got wishlist data from 58 games of differing team sizes, scopes, and experience levels. Then I looked at how many wishlists they got in the first 2 weeks of being on Steam. Average earned in first 2 weeks: 1008. Median earned: 149

#gamedev I just realized that my #GDC2021 talk has been made free for everyone. You can watch it here: gdcvault.com/play/1027142/3… In it I talk about all the great ways that you can make your Steam page look better 🧵🧵🧵🧵

#gamedev I posted the recording of my live Q&A from yesterday. You can watch it free as part of my howtomakeasteampage.com class. Just log in/signup, scroll down to "Bonus" and click the August QAs part 1 and 2. I thought I would share a couple of the best q's here 🧵🧵🧵👇👇 Q: Should I have 1 twitter account for my game and 1 for my studio? A: NO! It is hard to build up a following 10x harder doing it for 2 diff accounts. Building a following is like a snowball that you roll across games. So just make a studio account and theme it to your new game.

Hey #gamedev in just under 1 hour 30 minutes I am doing a LIVE Q&A over on my discord answering your questions about how to market your PC Steam game. I am going to answer viewer questions, review steam pages submitted by viewers. It is going to be very fun (smiling emoji) If you want to participate head over to my discord. discord.gg/upzreVf

So in a previous thread I wrote how it is VERY VERY hard to battle the algorithms and release a lot of small games on Steam. It is hard but not impossible. Here are some ways you might make it work! 👇👇👇🧵🧵🧵👇👇👇 Option #1 - It is your first game so F#$@ the algorithm! You have never released a game before. Who cares about getting visibility? You are just trying to figure out the miracle of releasing a game that is fun. Just don't quit your job first. Just try to learn game development.

Do you ever fancy ditching your long-in-development game and just rapidly release lots of smaller games on Steam? It is called a "rapid release" strategy and it won't work. here is why ... 1/16 🧵🧵🧵🧵👇👇👇 This official chart from Steam encapsulates the current algorithm. It compares the earnings of games released in 2018 vs 2019. The top two thirds of the scale earned MORE money and the bottom third of games made LESS money.

Every 3 months I like to look at the top selling Steam games to see what the trends in Capsule design are. #indiedev #indiedevhour This is what I found 🧵🧵🧵👇👇👇👇 Clouds are so hot right now. Which is a nice thing. If you don't have the budget for a huge complicated piece of art, just throw some clouds behind your main character!

Attention #gamedev and #indiedevhour lets talk about game genres and sales potential on Steam. Look at this chart. This is what genres the Steam player desires (oooh desire😍💦) Thread about this ...... 🔽🔽🔽 (1/10) That graph came from devs sending me the num wishlists they got during the Steam Summer Festival. I crossreferenced that to genres. This thread is not how we should market-test every idea and all ditch our dreams to make the same genre. I just want you to know the odds:(2/10)

Hi #gamedev #indiegames are you wondering if your Steam page traffic is normal? How much traffic should be converting? Is a 10% wishlist conversion rate good? I surveyed a bunch of games that appeared in the Steam Summer Festival 1 month ago and got some data ...👇🧵👇🧵📈📉📊 First. Details: Developers volunteered this data via a survey. In total, data for 56 games were submitted to me. There were 900 games in the festival. I reached out to developers who had very visible games. So take all that with a grain of salt when looking at "average" numbers.