Chris Zukowski: Marketing Ladder on Steam

thank you for attending everybody my name is Chris Zukowski and thank you so much to Elgin for hosting me and I really appreciate the the opportunity here in the in the program you put together sounds really really cool all right so um I called this talk this is a new one that I'm doing for this year called uh the marketing ladder on Steam and there's this weird thing because I I do a lot of these and I I got hired one time by this Investment Group and they just said Chris how do we get to the front page of steam that's all they wanted to know they're like I want to get to the front page of steam because if you do this stuff like steam next Fest which we just had last week with steam nextfest they have these widgets on the front of the next Fest um and there's only about 10 12 depending on on where you look at it 12 games on the front page of steam right here and it's like most popular most wishlisted big games always on the front page and the games that get here they earn like 65 000 wish lists to a hundred thousand in a single week that's what these type of games that are on the front page but you have to be the most wishlist to get up there which is weird because like if you look at the because I do surveys it's part of what I do to see all the games that got into these events like what they earned so each blue bar is a different game and if you look the these games in my survey these aren't all the games because I can only get so many people to share their data with me but these games they got like 65 000 wish lists during this one week that this game and then you'll see the games that kind of get featured up here these are the ones that get 65 000 that's mostly listed the games that get about 5 000 wishes are in these widgets there's like special widgets kind of like not at the top but kind of in the middle they're kind of specialized they're kind of in this range here this kind of range right here they usually get about five thousand to three thousand right here and then if you're not featured you don't get anything you kind of get about 700 wish lists that week if you're in the next best that's all these games right down here okay so that is what it looks like and it kind of seems weird um I've done I've done analysis and to get into this front page featured section you have to have about a hundred thousand wish lists going into the festival before they let you on there because it's ranked and so it's about a hundred thousand to get there and the hundred thousand games get sixty thousand wish lists it's weird right I mean if you think about it you have to have a lot of wish lists to get a lot of wish lists and it's this weird spiral I mean it's like why I have to have a lot to get a lot like how how do you get in on this how do you how do you even get into the spiral so that you can do it like what how do you get a lot of wish lists so that I can do this if that's what I'm going to talk to you about today because it's weird it just doesn't make any sense and this is the most frustrating thing about steam okay and so that's all I'm going to talk about today um this is me uh I write a lot about video games which gets me covered by like game industry Biz Vice Waypoint game developer I consult for Indies people hire me uh Publishers hire me steam uh you know like people publishing games on Steam individually like single developers they hire me and I teach them how to use Steam and that sort of stuff and I do this through my website how to Market a game.com free I have a newsletter every month I publish four articles basically once a week I'll publish an article and I just write about um different things on Steam different studies different games that may have won done well and what they did to get there so it's a free newsletter so you can sign up there and then every week you'll get updates from me about the newest things happening on Steam so that's my weekly blog but anyway let's get back to it okay so I call this the latter okay and it takes several little steps to get up to this Ladder rung which I call steam featuring you know how I said you kind of have to have a hundred thousand wish lists before you get into this thing this is like steam featuring That's What I Call steam featuring so what I'm going to do in this talk is show you the steps that you take to slowly get up here so that you have enough to get that featuring because this is what happened this is how you make money on scene this is how you actually like do okay on Steam all right so this is the way the basic structure of the talk um you'll see it here um we're just gonna pull this up let me let me go back one real quick okay so if you look steam curation is the top that's that's really that is that is the ultimate but to get there there's several kind of sub steps there's initial attention and I'll talk about that continued growth curated exposure steam featuring launch and then steam curation these are the basic steps to get all the way up to the steam featuring and then eventually steam curation which means your game made a lot of money to get that curation okay so let's talk about initial attention this is the first on-ramp to get the basics of visibility all right every game starts with zero wish lists on Steam the second you put your game up everybody whether you're EA devolver published game whatever everybody starts at zero so what happens that initial attention is the first Spark and it's you gotta your game has to have something I call the magic it's kind of undefinable just some games have it and some games don't let me describe like you all know this game Untitled Goose game it's just like you just see this and you're like I gotta try this game like what is this uh this game just kind of came out a squirrel with a gun I've seen this a lot on social media you just see this game like what the heck is this I gotta learn more about this game this game choo choo Charles again this game did really well they got like hundreds of thousands of wish list without even being featured by steam yet lots of stuff these games have what I call the magic where you just see it and you're like I gotta try that game that is something okay and I've broken it up this you know there's those games are funny like you see a screenshot you're like oh that's funny I gotta try that but there's other games there's other avenues and I've basically broken it down into six possible ways of earning what I call the magic okay and what I mean by the magic is I've marketed a lot of games like a lot of people hire me to help and some games you don't even have to work like my job is like so easy when the game has the magic like we don't know anything I'll just like email a streamer and say like you want to try this game the streamer says yes I do and they play it that's it um sometimes I uh just like send it to you know they'll send it to like a festival Festival lets them in no problem and then other games that don't quite have the magic every single thing is so impossible it is so hard to get some games visibility so there's six different ways to get the magic okay I'm gonna go through them an incredibly beautiful game a high concept game a hilarious Sandbox game amazing addicting gameplay infinitely deep game underserved audience these are six potential ways it doesn't always have to be like a silly game which I call High concept or beautiful games even if you don't have like a great artist on your team there's other avenues to have a game that has the magic but I find the games that do have it usually do one sometimes two of these but they're typically one of these six okay and now you'll notice this Gap here I break it down into two halves there are games when you just see it with a screenshot or you just see a tweet that just says this thing and you're like I gotta try that game which is like those first games that I showed you the other ones are playing as believing like they don't look amazing it's not like when you first see it but as soon as you start playing the game you're like this is the most fun game I've ever played I gotta play 40 hours of this game and not go to sleep those are the two different I I would say types are this you see what screenshot and seeing is believing and playing is believing I'm going to go through some examples so you kind of get a concept of what I mean by this so incredibly beautiful Graphics we all know this like as soon as you see a screenshot of some of these as Blasphemous like God that game looks just so interesting even though it's you know 2D pixel art most people like 3D but 2D pixel art can work because you're just like what is going on here look at this what I gotta play this game these type of games with incredibly beautiful graphics and I don't just mean like your units look good it has to be like amazing Graphics that have never been seen before weird art that is like mind-boggling uh the next one is a high concept game these are the games you see a screenshot and you hear what's going on and you're like that is amazing this is boyfriend dungeon is a perfect example of this it's a game where you first have to date your weapons and then you take them into a dungeon and fight monsters with your boyfriend Weapon It's like a crazy concept but as soon as you hear it you're like I don't know what is up with that game but I gotta try it it's just the concept eye itself is enough to to propel It Forward another one I call hilarious sandbox is like tabs where the game is just kind of like all these silly things happening where you just throw them together and you just push the play button and it's just weird gifts come out of it you know it just looks funny another game like this is um is uh it just escapes me real quick um um you know the the Half-Life 2 game Gary's Mod Gary's Mod is another example of this where it's just like just weird things and just throw it together and just magic happens that's a hilarious sandbox because you can just show a gif of this happening people like I gotta try this game what is going on why is there a woolly mammoth going sideways here um that's why these are like all with a screenshot so the way you go viral these is you tweet about it you put in Tick Tock a Reddit post a trailer you just show the game off and people like I'm I'm trying that game that's that's an amazing game you can't fake this your game either has it or it doesn't and I see a lot of people like oh man should I use this hashtag or not if you have one of these games it doesn't matter you just tweet about it you put it on Tick Tock it takes off um I find people spend way too long trying to game the system and if their game doesn't have one of these three things on social media it just doesn't take off okay um these are I I did I do surveys all the time and one thing I did was I studied where wishlists come from like what causes the most wishlist the top ones were festivals Tick Tock streamers Reddit press imager which doesn't really work anymore in Twitter okay Twitter is very low you'll notice most games don't do very well with Twitter but if you have one of those hilarious games where you just show a screenshot it does do pretty well same thing with tick tock tick tock can get you a ton of wishlist but you'll see that there's lots of games that just don't even mark on this graph those are games that don't have the magic they just don't have it so people try it they try Twitter and it doesn't work for them it's because their game doesn't doesn't have that that visual or funny concept that makes people go oh my God I gotta watch that um I gotta try that game Reddit is another one you'll notice there's a big gap because these bars are so small they don't even show up that's Reddit these games that do well thousands and thousands of wishlists in fact I'm going to show you an example right here this is a game called lacera Summit Kingdom I mean I don't I don't know why I wrote incredible well this is this game satisfies condition number one which is incredibly beautiful Graphics like I don't have to tell you this game is beautiful like you look at this game you're like this is amazing this game is a a city Builder built on the side of a mountain and it is just beautiful like you can zoom around it and stuff like you just tweet an image like this and like this is a game we're making that game's gonna go viral on Twitter okay and this is basically what they did they posted on r slash gaming which is a Reddit very popular gaming subreddit and within a day they had 73 000 of votes and eleven thousand wishlists now if you read their posts this is their post just search it you can find it uh this went live last year all they did was post a trailer and text that says like we're making the silly game about uh building a game on the side of a mountain and it went viral on Reddit and got them 11 000 wish lists okay there's no secret text or secret word or secret thing they did a lot of people ask like how do I do red how do I do Reddit Step One is make an amazingly beautiful game and then talk about it like Reddit loves 3D games if you're making a 3D game that looks amazing you can do well on Reddit it's the game you have to have the game first there's no secret message they hid in here that makes it work or certain secret time they posted people always ask me what time do I post to Reddit I don't know you post when you've got a good game that's the best time the best time to post to Reddit is when you have an awesome game and then you go viral from there that's that's the secret to Reddit is have an amazing looking game and this is what I mean by if your game has the magic Reddit works for you you just post a trailer and the message and it'll go viral that's the secret a lot of people say like I posted to Reddit and the mods pulled my game yep that's what happens it's because your game didn't have the magic and this game has the magic and so people are like the mods are like yeah the game actually sounds pretty cool I'm not gonna pull this that's the secret to Reddit okay I hate to say it but that's that's the secret okay now the other half now let's say you're maybe your coder and your art isn't as great you have programmer art or maybe it's just not great um let me show you exactly what I mean by this there's other ways to kind of go somewhat viral on Reddit if I could say all right and that's um what I call just having great gameplay so here's one amazing addicting gameplay we know this game right it's named by our survivors uh there's another one well let me go let me just put a finer point on that vampire survivors thing let me let me go back we all know vampire survivors you know went viral millions and millions but I think it's like the number two most steam deck played game um you you look at this game you're like what is this a joke why does this game look like this and it does like this game will not go viral on Twitter if you were to before anybody knew about this game if you just tweeted this image would ignore it it doesn't the graphics aren't the reason this game did so well it's because as soon as you play it you're like what the hell is this game I can't stop playing I'm not going to bed tonight that's what happens with a game like this okay that's what it is all right um You just have to have a fun game that's that's it that's the secret to life have a fun game um another one uh is what I call infinitely deep game play this game just I just wrote a blog post about this you can find it on my website cosmateer this game simulates building a spaceship and it is so detailed deep people can play it for hundreds of hours in fact this guy and I'll talk about this in a little bit he just put the game up for free like on itch and on his website for free the whole game and people this was like eight years ago he just put the game up for free and people played it and played it and he still sold millions of dollars worth of this game just because it's such a fun concept like people love on Steam infinitely deep gameplay so the graphics aren't amazing like and there's no dig at this guy it looks fine but the fun part about this game is that you get to build like you know thrusters and like you tell where your people go it's like so deep it's so deep and then another one I like to say is what I call underserved audience which is stardew Valley basically nobody was making good Harvest Moon games and there's a huge Harvest Moon audience and so this guy just said I love Harvest Moon I'm gonna make this and there was a whole audience that loved the old Harvest Moon games but nobody's making games so he served them and they're like great I'm just gonna play this game and so you know this game if by the by itself if you tweeted it ah it's not going to do very well but if there's an audience that's hungry that hasn't been getting games in a while you can give that them those games and do well so here's how to succeed on this okay with these playing as believing you don't typically go viral on Twitter you just don't you tweet about your game and people like okay it just looks like a bunch of boxes I don't know you've got to get that demo out it doesn't it's not until people play it until they have their game their hands on it that they usually feel that this game is amazing that it has the magic and that's why I recommend if you're trying for one of these strategies if your game falls under one of these categories get a demo out or a free version of your game as soon as possible and send it to streamers because when a streamer plays it they're like this game's amazing then they stream it and then people say oh my favorite streamers having a good time now I want that game that's how you succeed in this category here's a real life example this game's called Dome keeper recently released just in last year I mean the graphics are are decent I don't mean to say they're bad but when you see a screenshot like this you're like okay it's like some sort of maze game I don't know but it's actually this mining roguelike shooting it's like you just gotta play it I can't even describe it it doesn't sound that great but when you play it it is so addicting this guy when he launched it made a million dollars in his first week and he got a 188 180 000 wishlist by launch okay that's what he launched with huge but if you look at it you're like oh so so what what's the deal with this game it has to be so fun to play and so let me show you what happened and how he got to where he did like he actually the the creator of it if you look at his follower chart followers are very close to to wishlist for a long time he put up a steam page up here and he was marketing it tweeting about it but it was you know like I said the graphics aren't like oh my God and so they were flat and then he launched a demo of his game right about here streamers picked it up and the game took off that's right here you can see right you can guess I don't even need to put that Arrow you know when the demo launch it's right about there and here's what happened is he gave it to some streamers put the demo out and these streamers played it back to back look how many look at the dates I put the dates when they streamed it like because streamers watch each other and they're like oh my God that game looks so fun let me try it oh look at how many streamers play this game within a month of the game's demo going out this is his actual wishlist chart for the for the streamers like one streamer played it and he got 2 700 wishlists in a day from that one streamer and then other streamers found it and then other streamers found it and then other streamers found it all this he got 40 000 wish lists in one month because he has a game that you only realize the value once you play it okay and that's why having a demo out helped I'm here to tell you for whatever one whether you do one through six a beautiful game or a game that's so fun to play it doesn't it doesn't matter what kind of marketing you do 90 of your game's success is the games itself like your game has to be beautiful or it has to be fun to play I mean preferably both but you can do either one it's just the game there's no trick this marketing stuff I can't I can't convince somebody to like a game if they don't like it that's the whole secret to marketing we're not brainwashers you have to have a good game like that's that's the secret okay so let me when I say good game let me let me show you what I mean okay so what last year 2022 I went through every game well I did it in January of this year I went back to 2022 and elected every game that got a thousand reviews because that kind of indicates when you get the Thousand that a lot of people like this team like this game hits and I graphed I said I picked a genre for each of those 11 games I looked at all of them and I just graphed them to see what the genres that were most played in 2022 or that's what this graph shows and you'll see here's a it's real small but this is the graph you'll see some genres this is the number of games that reached at top level so here there were about 32 horror games that's what this first part 32 horror games made it to the top of the charts last year and then I just did Indie Games I filtered out AAA games I filtered out the Triple A's 32 horror games the next one was Shooters and that was first person shooters and kind of like third person shooters I just combined anything that had a gun so um horror and Shooters are top then RPG then Survivor likes or simulation sorry simulation and then um sexually explicit games but those are like the top five games management was up there those are the top genres love they love those games and I kind of just kind of say like that's the best ones the ones at the very bottom now I should say we're only looking at the top winners and basically some of them are match three immersive Sim Mech open world run and Gun Tower Defense that's the ones at the bottom now that means only one Tower Defense made it to the top of the charts last year only one only one immersive Sim made it to the top of the charts that's that's kind of what this graph is showing you that there are genres that players on Steam just can't get enough of like horror they just they just love them they love horror games so in general I do this math all the time like I always look at what other top sellers on Steam here are the genres that steam loves when I say fun gameplay and steam players just can't get enough of these are the genres Forex farming Sim City Builder management shooter deck building metroidvania simulation building RPG visual novel roguelike Horror in general when I see a game it's one of these genres I'm like okay there's a good shot this game will do well on Steam these genres it really matters What type of game you make in general these are the very hard to sell on Steam these games are hard to sound steam when somebody comes to me and they say Chris I'd like to hire you to Market your game to help me market my game and I see the genre I'm like oh okay this is going to be a hard one this is going to be very hard to do it's typically these genres VR Tower Defense puzzle games a lot of Indies make puzzle games a lot but they just don't do well on Steam Platformers like 2D Platformers 3D Platformers it doesn't matter just the jumping trying to land on stuff RTS multiplayer games in general party games you know like um Fall Guys type of thing even though Fall Guys is huge that's one of the hard ones to actually do is party games shmups like schmutum UPS like Space games where you fly around and just try and shoot asteroids and stuff and also like enemies coming at you in waves and then beat em ups you know like uh 2D old beat em up type of games these games are hard to market the steam Shoppers really don't like them that much usually the games that do well here have extremely good graphics like unbelievably good graphics it is very hard to sell these genres if your graphics aren't just like amazing amazing very few games will do well in this genre these are the ones that like one or two were the top of the charts last year very hard okay a lot of people come to me and they'll say like Chris does my game have the magic I don't know I can't tell you that I just don't know that's not my job I don't know how I can I honestly I've been in this for years I can't look at a game and say like this is it other than the genre of say maybe you got it you just have to let the market decide you have to show a bunch of people and say like are you into this like not your friends or your mom she's gonna say I love you honey yes your game's great you need to show it to random steam people does your Tweet get a thousand uh you know like um when you tweet do you get a thousand wish lists don't mean a bunch of retweets and like thumbs up or likes or whatever does it turn into actual wish lists when you post on Reddit do you get 73 000 other votes do your tick tocks go viral these are the signs if your game has the magic that's the indicator I can't tell you that we just have to test it um here's another thing when you put your games demo out is your median Play Time 25 minutes or greater I find the games that have that you know how I said it's only fun when they get their hands on it those type of games usually have median play times greater than 25 minutes okay do streamers play your game over and over and over I mean the same streamer and I've seen this for these sandboxy games the same streamer will play a demo every week it's amazing that means your game has the magic okay that's why I spent so much time on this initial attention if you don't have that initial attention like this this rung doesn't exist they'll never get past this is the this is it people think they think about oh I couldn't get my tweets to go viral or this or that they blame all these other things it's the game if your game is not the magic you can't do the rest of these it's just impossible and most games I see do not get past this first step okay basically what happens is if your game has the magic this initial attention it'll either it'll and you'd play your cards right then it'll go up to the front page if it doesn't if it's most people I look at I'm like oh the game looks pretty good do you want to try it ah no it's okay I gotta I got a thing to do that's a sign that your game doesn't have the magic and typically what happens is you'll try really hard but you'll end up when your game's ready to launch at like 5 000 maybe maybe 10 000 wish list somewhere in there and then maybe at the top earn about 150 000 that's just I see this all the time that's typically what happens but if your game has the magic you're going front page all this stuff that's that's really what happens so here's typically where people Market their games they um do a whole bunch of pre-production maybe do some early coding and stuff they put their steam page up and then they're still doing production while their steam page is up and then they post a demo and then they go they launch they go to sale okay this is typically how things have always been done but what I'm seeing is there's a new generation of games and what they do is they pull this backwards they pull all this stuff backwards so you do pre-production and you get your steam page coming soon page created really early much earlier than you think and then you post your demo much earlier see most people post it right before they launch the successful games nowadays are putting their demo out way before much earlier okay and then they do a lot of marketing they collect wish lists they get momentum through streamers they have this long period where their game is public and they do a long production and then they put the game out for sale this is the new trend is to really pull this stuff back further okay so that you get more time to get that exposure and the other thing that they do by getting your demo back earlier you can get that sense of whether your game is fun or not and a lot of people will see like oh um I'm not getting 25 minutes play time which Chris said indicates that my game has the magic maybe they only have like 10 minutes of median play time and they're like okay let's focus on gameplay so they post their demo and then they change the game they modify they make it easier or harder then they update the demo and they get more feedback and people are like oh no you made it too hard that's not good and so then they fix it and they improve the you know playability of the game and then by the time they're ready to launch their game is like cooking like it is it feels good like all those little bugs all that design issues are worked out it's fun that that is what's going on so when you have a game that has the magic you can do this kind of what I call continued growth basically you exist on Steam your game has the magic and I'll be honest if you go viral like I I talked about that lacera Kingdom even though they went viral they got 11 000 wishlist that's not a lot in the grand scheme of things like a thousand to twelve hundred those initial Sparks they're not a lot they just indicate that people are excited about you you still got a long way to go you cannot do very well on Steam even if you get just 12 000 wish lists you have to do this continued growth this is what domekeeper did see Dome keeper they did well and they they spent almost a year just building wish lists because they had the magic they had their demo out people were playing it so they just had to put it out there and grow grow grow grow that's that's the real marketing so example okay when your game has the magic you've had that Viral moment steam just kind of promotes you they figure out that your game has the magic I don't know how they do it and then they just kind of start promoting you this is I did a survey of of hundreds of games they sent me their data each bar is a different game you'll notice this graph shows visits per week this is just on a regular week how much traffic does steam send these games they they didn't these aren't covered by streamers this was like a no promotion period you'll notice these games that have the magic they get thousands and thousands of visits everybody else that doesn't quite have the magic it's not much you don't get much traffic steam knows when you have something there and they just send you a ton of traffic look at these games look at how much more traffic these exciting games have than everybody else it it's the magic I can't explain it and so what I've done is I've collected enough data that I've started to form what I call benchmarks and so I can kind of see these games that are kind of just haven't hit it yet 0 to 40 wish list per week the games that have the magic I call them Diamond tier 300 to a 3 000 wishlist per week they just get so much traffic this is how they get up to a hundred thousand wish lists by launch this is how it's week by week they're not even doing anything their game just exists and it gets 100 to 700 wish lists that's what I call Gold tier it's like just below Diamond but man these top two if you get a game into these type of things notice they overlap this isn't a typo it's sometimes games they're based on Revenue so sometimes games get like a ton of weekly traffic but they don't quite convert as well but still if you're gold or Diamond you're in the right spot this is the magic okay that's what I mean by the magic typically steam traffic comes from these search suggestions Discovery queue more like this in direct navigation this is what I mean you can't gain these search suggestions comes from YouTube so when YouTube covers you a lot of people will search on Steam oh what was that game that YouTuber was playing that's why search suggestions is so big all four of these you can't game these there's not like one weird trick it's just when you have a really exciting game Steam promotes you and streamers play you and then you get traffic this is where the traffic comes from but that only comes when you have a really awesome game and this is another thing this is a very crude graph that I drew to kind of explain it this is one of the reasons why I say get YouTubers to play your demo nice and early because if one of YouTuber plays your game YouTube has a very long tail of visibility it's just the way the YouTube algorithm works so if you only give it to YouTubers right before launch here's two scenarios like you only give the demo out just before you launch or scenario B is you pull your demo in nice and early and you give it out to streamers way before you're ready to launch you'll notice in scenario a when you only give it to streamers right at the end of your games month thing you were flat for a very long period of time and then you reached out to streamers and you gave it but look that tail is fat but it's after you launch that doesn't do you much good these games that show their demo like Dome keeper they give out their demo nice and early they pulled it out back very far right so they got that initial streamer traffic and then you'll notice the tail is fatter steam picks up on that all these YouTubers were sending traffic to your page and steam will match that and so you get this much fatter tale of collecting wishlist for a very long time while you're still building your game while you're still making it and then you launch and you do more streamer Outreach and so you get into the second bump notice the difference like that's why the strategy is to move the streamer Outreach back to very early in development so you get this nice fat tail from YouTube okay that's why you got to get your demo out nice and early Okay so we've talked about continued growth which is just Market your game for a while get that demo out share it early so that steam reacts now we get to the curated exposure this is a cool trick but only after you've gone viral let me show you curated exposure is stuff like IGN their YouTube page is huge if you can get them to feature your trailer you get tons of traffic it is amazing but they only accept certain games this is curated you have to email somebody at IG and say hey would you like to host my trailer and they might go yeah your game looks good we'll host it or they'll be like get out of here kid your game looks like junk that's that's what I mean by curated but you want to get on this page this is awesome thousands look at how many views these get hundreds of thousands of views these games on IGN another one's like the PC Gamer show they have hot every June I think it's June May time period they host the PC Gamer show and what do they do they just play your games by these like famous hosts and they're like look at this game and then they show your trailer and it's awesome and you get so many wishlists from something like this but that's curated you send them your game and they're like this game looks cool I like it I'll put it on the show but the way you get it is by what I call trading up for visibility okay so I'm going to show you a specific example of how to get covered by IGN okay so here's a game it's called paranormal Tails it's pretty new it's not released yet still in production okay it's a it's beautiful it's a horror game which team likes and it looks really good and it's basically like you're wandering through a spooky house not complicated you're just walking through a spooky house they tweeted about it had this really creepy gameplay where this like monster girl runs upside down at you it's creepy thousands of likes look at that look at how many likes I got retweets this game has the magic okay step one they got the magic so they went viral on Twitter with just this like few second trailer it's just so creepy right got a lot of traffic from that what the developer of this did this guy's really smart he reached out to IGN when they went viral he immediately emailed IGN and he said um this tweet is going viral this is the actual text this is the actual email but I just copied the text so it's easier for you all to read it says it's unexpectedly going viral it's only been a few hours and we already have three thirty thousand likes on Twitter if this is something IGN would be interested in posting on YouTube or socials you have my referral permission to edit and use this video here's a link to the trailer and then he just sent a video to IGN and IGN was like oh this is going viral we're definitely going to post this because here's the thing even the people at IGN don't know what is a good trailer they don't you have to have social proof to show that this is going to go viral so when the guys tweet went viral that is proof to IGN to say our game is got the magic you know how I say it's impossible to know whether the game that has the magic you just have to put it out there and it either does or doesn't this game had the magic and they were like here's proof that it has the magic and IGM is like oh this game has the magic we're gonna put it up on our YouTube channel that is how you trade up that visibility okay then and went up on YouTube it went on the IGN official Channel hundreds of thousands of views on this thing this that's how you trade up and then extra smart you didn't just stop there he then turned around and sent another email he emailed Kotaku game in fortnite game radar uh gaming Bible he just basically said we got covered on IGN would you like to get covered and they're like oh IGN covered it that must mean they have the magic we want a piece of that and they then posted that trailer and wrote articles about it so you see he traded up the visibility and he kept saying this game's getting covered here and here and up and up and up and went that's the secret so basically he said he first had that Viral tweet then he got IGN coverage and then he got PC game recovered see how he keeps trading up the the first thing viral tweet you got your game has had the magic first that's that's the first rung of the ladder all right so we just talked about curated exposure this is like the igns they say yes your game has a magic we will host you on our awesome platform the next step in the letter is steam featuring okay this is a widget that nobody really talks about but it's secretly the most important thing it's called The Discovery queue most people don't do it but enough people do it on Steam it's this little widget on Steam you can see it just go on your Steam account there's a little thing called Discovery Cube okay when a game goes big twenty percent of all their traffic comes from the silly little widget in the middle of steam it is like secretly the most important thing on Steam okay now steam only gives you that if your game has the magic and what happens is they see a bunch of traffic from other sources like a streamer or if you go viral on Twitter or Tick Tock and it's like what why is all this traffic coming from we're gonna match it and they start boosting you here's a game I consulted for um they got covered by Street streamers in January and this is graphing how much Discovery queue traffic they got and so what we saw was when they got covered by streamers the discovery queue kicked in and matched all that traffic it doubled their traffic just from the discovery queue they got more streamer coverage just before they launched Discovery Cube from Steam was like yep here's some more coverage and then when they launched they had so many wishes so much traffic steam was like Boop and they just gave them all the discovery Q traffic in the world most of their sales came from Discovery queue but this only happens when you get a bunch of traffic from outside and as we know to get it traffic from outside you have to have a magic game it has to get covered by streamers and that's how you get this it's a ladder it's a ladder other widgets that steam has they don't work as well as Discovery Cube but they're very important this widget at the bottom called more like this and this one called similar games lots of traffic coming to those but steam only puts your game in here just how big these games are these are big name games steam only puts your game in there if you've got a lot of traffic if you have a lot of traffic coming to your steam page and so that brings us to steam nextfest remember how I said to get into this thing you have to have a lot of wish lists we all know how to get wishlist now you have to have that initial spark trade up for visibility and then just stay on Steam with that heightened visibility for a long time and eventually you're gonna hit that hundred thousand and then you opt into steam nextfest when you've got hundreds of thousands of wishlists and bada boom right there you're on the front page of steam you did it congratulations you're now on the front page of steam now once you've gotten all that steam visibility that we talked about it's time to Launch when you launch you have enough wish list and you sell enough in a short period of time steam puts you on this new and trending list and you get so much visibility and money from this widget on front so basically wishlist turn into sales turn into steam featuring that's how it goes that's what it works so you got a good launch now we get to the thing steam curation I love this part okay people always say I wish steam was curated it would be so good if steaming with curated here's the secret steam's curated it is steam is actually curated but you first have to prove that you got the magic if your game doesn't have the magic they're not going to curate you they automatically curated you out let me show you when you sell at least 300 000 thereabout this isn't an official thing this is like that's soft math in you sell about this amount you can call up seem somebody who works at valve and say we uh we'd like to do a daily deal and they look they say they always say uh let's just check to see if he'd be a good fit and they turn around and they look at your sales numbers and they see to see if you've got about 300 000 somewhere about there it's not official it's curated and they're like oh you have made 300 000. we'll give you one and they curate they do they curate you they put you in these little daily deals steam is curated everybody complains they wish steam was curated it is it's the daily deal this gives you hundreds of thousands of dollars you can usually do two per year if you're cool if they're curating you and they will opt you into these things and you do that this is the secret to sustainable game development that's how you make the money honestly that's really how you do it okay so let's just kind of wrap this up a little bit there's this game we play in the US some people I've actually never played it but I hear a lot of people do it's called bigger and better and there's this um there's this famous uh Ted talk you can search it it's called like red paper clip to a house and this guy it's a story this guy here here he is he was able to take a paper clip and just by making some clever trades he ended up trading in for a house he got a house for a red paper clip you're like what for free he didn't pay any money for this he just had to write a paper clip how did they do that it's called bigger and better and this whole talk if you watch this talk it's pretty good he just traded a paper clip for a cool pen a pen for a weird doorknob a doorknob for a furnace for a little cooking stove a cooking stove for a generator then he turned it into a little sign and a beer keg full of beer which he turned into a truck which he traded in for a house that's what he did like every trade was just a little bit better a little bit better and by keep massing up these increases he ended up with a house and this is a perfect example of how you reach that top tier of steam right basically what you're doing is your game has zero wish lists but you have this good game and so what you do is you get that Viral tweet which gives you 4 000 wishes which is not it's not gonna get you a million dollars but it's a start and then you trade that for visibility on IGN because they're like oh you got four thousand which that means you're hot you've got the magic we'll host your trailer which can get you like 40 000 wish lists sometimes and then it gives you all this visibility steam now saw that your IGN trailer is bringing in tons of traffic so steam's like give this game more traffic and so then you just sit on it and every day steam is sending you tons of traffic and you just let that build up to 50 000 and then you trade that up to get into PC gaming show which gets you a hundred thousand and now you're up there you are launching at steam nextfest with 160 000 wish list they put you on the front page then you get all the visibility this is how you get here this is what I was talking about by that slow growth and all of a sudden you're at the top and everybody's like where'd this game come from it started way back here that's how it happened that's how it happened now if your game is not like you know super beautiful like I said you don't have to just be a pretty game it's one of these games where it's like playing as believing you know where I said it's got addicting gameplay it's infinitely deep or it's serving an underserved audience you might tweet about this game and it gets nowhere you know that happens all the time secretly most games don't do well on Twitter they just don't but you get a hundred wish lists you're like oh God this sucks but you put your demo out which is super fun and you get a thousand which just by your fun demo going out and then you send it to streamers and every streamer is like holy moly this game's fun I'm gonna play it every week on my stream which just gets you so many wishes don't keeper got 40 000 wishes in a month because of all their streamer coverage playing a demo that is super fun and it just builds and then you just let it ride on Steam you just say like all right steam now knows we have a good game it's sending us all this traffic you get natural visibility up to your hundred thousand then you enter steam next fest with your game that has a hundred thousand and you get that bonus wish list because you're on the front page of steam nextfest you see you see how it's like a very small step here this zero to a thousand but once you have this thing you there's a slow path up this is the ladder of steam visibility and that's it that's my talk like I said I give a free book away and my weekly mailing list is uh howtomarketagame.com free um this is my contact information if you want to contact me Twitter accounts there's that um I also do a class I have this whole class it's online it's self-paced you just watch it um I'm gonna give it look I made a special log just because you watched my thing um just for Elgin uh I'll I'll knock half the price I'll just throw throw it for half price you just go to howtomarketagame.com courses this is the course just enter this coupon when you're checking out there's this little coupon the code you just type in Elgin that's all you type Elgin I'm only going to do it keep it up on a Friday because it's like once it kind of hits YouTube who knows what kind of weirdos I'm only doing this for Elgin though so that's it that's a talk I'm here for questions um I hope that worked um that's it ask away thank you so much for having me

Channel: LGIN - Living Game Intelligence Network

Views: 16,993

Keywords:

Id: E656RcGWcEs

Length: 46min 58sec (2818 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 24 2023