Empathizing with Steam: How People Shop for Your Game

[Music] my talk today is called empathizing listin how buyers see your game so about a year ago I released my first game on Steam and when you're going through the process and you're filling out all the forms you get this Store page form and it's just this giant blank box that you have to fill out that describes it just prompts you to say about this game and I had no idea what to put in this box so I made up something I just just through words at it basically and my game released and it didn't sell very well it was very positive I got a lot of good reviews but it just didn't sell and I just wondered what the hell or Steam shoppers are actually looking for and so I took this really really extreme basically step to do which is I just started watching people buy games on Steam I found people online who are willing to let me do a one on one screen share through discord and I just gave him the simple prompt go shop for stuff on Steam I just want to see what you do and what I did was I did this for 15 hours I'm not straight I did this across several different different Steam shoppers and I really got a good sense of what they're looking for and so what I'm gonna show you in this talk is what I learned in those 15 hours I'm gonna show you how to get good screenshots good videos I'm gonna show you that I found some really strange behavior that players are incredibly genre focused and they really know what they like what they don't like and then I'm gonna show you some tricks that I learned during steam sales and how to make your game more attractive and then the other thing that I did was I found out that their friends really play a big big big role in what games they pick and which ones they don't and so I'm going to show you how to to kind of maximize that and really get good word of mouth based on your steam page and just in general marketing okay so there's gonna be five parts to this talk I'm gonna talk about the methodology that I use and why I did it I'm gonna show you how to make your steam page that sells I'm gonna show you the steps that a typical user is going to go through when they're looking at steam I'm gonna show you how to know your genre and why that's so important incredibly important it is and then forth I'm gonna show you how to manage a steam sale can be a little crazy and then fifth I'm gonna show you how to turn those wish list errs into actual buyers because you can get stuck in the cart and not get out so I'm going to show you all of this today so let's start with the methodology I'm an indie game designer but I'm also a marketing consultant so in addition to making games I also help other companies sell their own games and make their marketing just just as tight as can be so I have a real interest in this and a lot of history with helping people make better games and marketing them better my first game was one screen platformer on Steam and before I'm got into games and before I started becoming a marketing consultant I was a UX designer and this is actually a picture that I took it's at an airport I used to work for an airline and what I would do is I would go and watch how people actually use the products that I worked on because as a designer we were and we were trained over and over again do not start designing until you understand what the user does and so I'm here I am watching some folks get boarded on a flight to Chicago and this same approach is what I applied to steam and understanding how to steam user shop on steam and the reason that's so important and why UX designers learn that is because the users of your software or steam are not like us as designers being a designer or game developer is a very specific field and we have different notions of what is good and what's bad than the average consumer and so it's really important that you actually step in and empathize with your users by watching how they actually use things and so instead of the airline being my client steam is my client so I treated it the same way I would when I was working in industry and so what I did was I recruited users and I set up a one-on-one screen share for about a half an hour per user and I just gave them a very simple prompt I said what do you do when you start steam and then I just let them go and the way that we do in UX is you try and shut up you do not want to influence the user too much so we do something called talk aloud and basically I give them a simple prompt that says just say everything that you're thinking and that really makes sure that people when they click on something I know why they clicked on it or when they stopped to hover I know why they're hovering and one of the participants said you mean like a let's play of steam and I was like that's exactly it it was so hard in UX to get people to talk aloud but gamers understand this concept of narrating everything that they do so really wasn't very hard to get people talking and over the course of the study I used 15 participants they the color coding just shows the different phases of the test that I used so they I'm gonna keep them anonymous because that was part of their agreement I didn't want to bring everybody you know public about who they were so I just color code them and name them with a letter I actually did three phases to this test so there's a face during a normal steam day just no sales or anything then during a Halloween sale which was a seasonal sale and in Phase three was something called a diary study and it lasted for three whole months so I'll show you all of these again the colors just kind of indicate that the the people that I used in every study so for example a participant a was used in all three of them and that's why color coded is orange because I originally met that participant in phase one and then they just carry through through the other one so it just the colors indicate which phase they're in I also recruited worldwide I really tried to get a good broad swath of the population I got every continent except for Africa and Australia unfortunately Africa doesn't use steam very much I really tried to find some folks but it's really hard to find them and then this kind of matches demographic house team is made up anyways just by the by the percentages I also over-represented female gamers this was to really get a broad swath of of use cases on there's some estimates it's about eighteen to five percent of steams audience is female but I got it up to almost 50% I had six identified females in my participant list also did 18 and over that's because I made everybody sign a disclosure form so that just to have an agreement that it's okay for me to share this data with all of you and for me to record them so I wanted to make sure there was 18 plus so there's no reason I didn't want to have to recruit parents and to get there kid to sign this form or anything so and and most of my audience anyway for indie games is over 18 anyway I also made sure that all the participants had over 50 games and that's because I'm a indie game developer and the people who buy indie games buy a lot of games that's just because most players who only play maybe a Skyrim or a csgo just don't have that many games so I really wanted to target an indie buying crowd and you're probably wondering like 15 people that's it what about sample size and so I know that's that's a very critical thing for quantitative research which is the opposite of qualitative researchers which what I did with quantitative research you're really trying to identify the giant data sets and prove a perfect correlation of using Spearman's Rho on all these giant members on qualitative research as the other side and what you're trying to do is a breadth of experiences so for example here's a very famous industrial designer named Pat Moore and what she did was she was trying to study how the elderly used the world and so what she did she dressed herself up as an older person she found her hands wore glasses that made it hard for her to see and she just explored the world and figured out where things were difficult for somebody who was elderly or who would be elderly like that in her research and she was a test case of one led to things like the Ox oh good grips she helped design the Ox of good grips those kitchen tools that have nice giant grips that are easier to used for people who might have mobility problems and again those just were insanely popular and it was all because she took a qualitative approach to design similarly another industrial designer named Doug Dietz he designed the CRT with the imaging machines at hospitals and he designed this whole thing all the engineering was sound and they put it in the hospital it worked perfectly and then one day he went off to the hospital just to see how it was used and turns out I was in the pediatric ward and when he sat outside the pediatric ward and he saw folks coming in he noticed that the parents and the the people who were going to be using it and the children were just not very excited about using this machine and it wasn't until he actually went and observed real users using his device that he realized that it was just impractical and so what he did was he redesigned his CRT mate Sheena's imaging machine so there was a lot easier and just more appealing and so even if you can't get a huge huge sample set when you're doing qualitative research you're really trying to get a breadth of research and Nielsen Norman who is part of the this research group if they do they do a lot of UX design and UX research and what they say is discovering the unexpected as part of the reasons you do this type of research basically you don't know what you do know but you don't know what you don't know until you do qualitative research and the idea is that you should always pair qualitative with quantitative because quantitative can prove definitively a couple of single points but you could be proving the wrong one and the qualitative research is a great way to kind of look back and see a broad range of ways that you could do research and when you're doing qualitative research the most important thing is something called saturation and saturation is is basically I'm looking not to confirm the same thing multiple times what I'm trying to do is find all the edge cases and all the possible paths that people take so for example there's kind of a good rule of thumb after about six or seven interviews you start to notice the same things being said over and over again and that's the saturation taking place and I definitely saw that and so what I'm trying to do is and that's why Oprah represented women in the study is I was trying to find all the different aspects that could implement it could be the the use cases that people have on Steam so qualitative again is a good way to do springboard for quantitative research and I really hope that people who watch this video or read my talk later will actually take this as an inspiration could to go do more quantitative studies based on what I have initially found here so the important thing about koala qualitative research is you're not going to hear me make judgments about how many things happen so for instance if I saw something happen with seven my participants out of fifteen I can't say oh this is gonna happen for these six percent of all steam is gonna do this I'm not gonna make those value judgments of how often it occurs but I can say I've seen this happen or this is a common workflow so that's just a way to understand the way to interpret qualitative data okay could go into how I recruited I'm not gonna do that today you can read more about that on my website I've did a whole article just on how I did the methodology for this study so but let's just get into the good stuff here all right so I'm going to show you how to make a steam page it sells there's basically three steps here you're going to attract them tell them what your genre is and then build trust with them that's what your steam page is gonna do and I'll show you how to do that now I'm gonna go rapid-fire through this if this is way too fast to take notes on my website I actually put together a special document it's just a checklist of things you should do on your steam page before you hit the publish button so it's a nice form that you can use it's just kind of like a a guide okay so there's the 8 steps that people go through and they're looking to see whether they should wishlist your game they browse hover click to inspect the page go to your steam page then they view the games media they check tags they skim the short description not do a full read they totally skip over the long description and then they check for the negative reviews and I'm gonna show you step by step how that works okay so the brows you know they look at the steam page look around for any icons or any of these capsule images and if they find one that's interesting they do what I call the hover and here's a video that I took this is just an animated gif of somebody who's doing this hover and what she's looking for when she does this she's just watching these images cycle there's a four image cycle that goes on and she's looking to see what the genre of the game and if it looks like something that she's gonna watch I don't want to actually interact with him maybe possibly buy and she's looking at the user tags and she's also looking at the number of your views and if she likes what she sees in those four images she's gonna do a click now that is super important to get that tooltip and this was one of the greatest revolutions that I had when I was doing this research was that tool tip and the thing that's so important is that tool tip only appears when they hover over the image and so you want your capsule image to be super attractive I call it a mouse magnet for some reason this this capsule is an excellent mouse magnet any time I was watching participants browse beam and the remnant came up that Mouse went straight to this image I don't know what it's what it is about this image there's something weird about it I don't know if it's some like Cthulhu magic going on but everybody hovered on this image and it's just it doesn't matter the genre even people who didn't like shooters hovered over this image I think it's just the mysteriousness of it they're just the interesting face that guy's got their stuff there's just a bunch of things that are interesting so really test your capsule image to make sure it turns into a mouse magnet the other thing is the hover has four images that cycle so you really have to be cognizant of those four images and this is totally just totally unclear unless you study this stuff this is a picture of the Steamworks UI those this is my game the steam UI does not tell you that the first four images are the most important that are going to show up in this hover so you just have to know that so there's no indicator here just make sure you prioritize the top four images on Steamworks to be the four that you want to see in that hover cycle and what kind of images should you put in that cycle it's got to be really descriptive of your game and the actions are gonna be taking for instance here's a game that's never gonna be on Steam its breath of the wild now I picked these four images because I think they're cool but I don't think these would be good for your first four images look at them they're all showing combat they're showing you boss battles a user who doesn't know what breath of the wild in is and it's just browsing might interprets this as like some sort of action RPG it could be a Souls like it could be a roguelike action action roguelike it's just unclear what you do in this game it just looks like you're just doing battling a better for image cycle selection would be to show the four key elements of the game so for instance for breath of the wild you do a lot of open-world exploration then in the top right there's some crafting and inventory management on the bottom right you do some puzzle solving and then you do do some battles and some boss fights but that's just one element and so when the these four images cycle you get a better grasp of what the game is so really be cognizant of the four images you pick you don't want to repeat yourself and you want to show a good set of the verbs of the game the other thing that people check are the user tags now the user tags you only get five on the hover so you got to make sure those first five are just describing your genre perfectly I see a lot of things where it's like indie that Indy tag is worthless that does not tell people what the genre is so you want to make sure that your top 5 are the other ones are like female protagonists that's a noble tag to have but it doesn't tell this genre and they can probably distinguish that it identify that's a female main character from the capsule and screenshots so it's worthless as a tag the other thing the tags do for folks is they identify things that they might not like about the genre for instance people who don't like difficult games if they see Metroidvania as a tag that's a Cindy I dent afire for them that this is a difficult game even if they don't play multi Metroidvania they know from history sake that Metroidvania is are hard so they will actually move away from the game if it's a Metroidvania now that's to say if you do have a Metroidvania please put that tagging that's important you just have to be aware that there's reasons people do not want that game so they if they like what they see on the hover they're gonna click on the cap so image and here at this point they want your game to be awesome if they've clicked they think your game is neat they're on your side they're looking for things to rule them out of this game okay and so once they're on your steam page they do they're looking at four big things they're looking to the art then they look at the tags and then they look at the short description and then they skip all the way down and they look just at the reviews specifically the negative reviews now when they're looking this is an actual animated gif of somebody looking at the media now you'll watch they click real fast in for the screenshots they're not much of a trailer first they're looking at the screenshots what they're looking for is gameplay they want to see what you are doing what the verbs of the game are and so they click through them really really fast this guy's actually going slow because he's trying to explain what he's doing then they might go to the trailer and when they're looking at the video they're skipping ahead really fast watch he's skipping ahead right there now I have some friends who make trailers and they were a little afraid of this and the main thing is I'm not saying to ditch trailers that have any form of cinematics I think those should be still made you just don't want to include them on your steam page they're great for YouTube to have rich story elements but first they just want to see the action they want to see the verbs of the game so cut out anything that isn't you actually playing the game no big intro wind-ups no slow panning environment shots they just want to see the action okay so this is how not to do Israeli this is an actual video all my cinematics I want to see some Gaza gameplay you can hear the frustration in this guy's voice Jesus but Missy gameplay oh that's the game play all right where's the UI to get more of the house god I mean whenever you see the UI you'll be able to like at least assume some of the portions of the game right like how will you be playing it and things like that this one doesn't tell me anything it's just food he was so frustrated he did a little bit of swearing there had to beat that out sorry folks and what he's frustrated about is he just wants to see gameplay and one of the surprising things is he also wants to see you I when I was originally designing pages first team I thought they just want to see a majestic beautiful screen nobody comes to see menus they actually do want to see menus and the reason is it helps them identify the genre if you can see a UI you can identify the genre look at this one right here two bars some characters and a number timer in the middle obviously that's a street fighter game a 2d Street Fighter nice reticle a gun in the bottoms and health some bullets that's a first-person shooter easy just to animate characters and a dialog box obviously a visual novel the UI really tells you the genre better than any description or anything else so show UI in your screenshots I would have never guessed but it is so important for players to be able to identify the genre after they look at the media they go over to the tags I already talked about that a lot of them will expand the tags to really look for them you have the control as a developer to really pick your tags by eliminating them again remove indie remove it anything that doesn't tell Jean rrah the most important thing that they're looking for is identifying the genre now the short description here's another animated gif of a person who's shopping here they're just skimming it and what they're looking for our verbs they're trying to identify what do you do in the game not the setting they don't care about character's story they don't care any about the fluffy stories even people who love games that are story based in fact this participant does they don't care about story at this point they're just trying to identify what do you do in the game in fact I heard a lot of people when it was a big story based short description they'd go blah blah blah blah blah what do I actually do they actually said blah blah blah they don't want to see a big story or lore dump stick to the verbs stick to the actions of what you're doing in the game okay the long description everybody skip this thing so I'm gonna skip it too you could put a recipe in there for whatever I know it doesn't matter okay the negative reviews they'd always skip down and it's not that they hate you I was really afraid when I started reading negative reviews when they started coming in for my game but it doesn't matter have heart if it stresses you after a negative use don't worry because the only thing that players who watch your game are looking for are are the reasons this person had a negative response the same reason I don't like him so if they're a story based player and if they care about the story they're gonna look for reviews that maybe say hey the story is bad the characters are 2-dimensional that ending sucks that's what they care about but if it's an action based player somebody who cares about fps is or good action they are looking more for things like maybe framerate or how the character or how them maybe enemy's behavior how the AI is they're really looking forward to see what they match up with and we all hate these type of negative reviews that just are like one line nopes we tweet about them we complain about them don't worry don't waste any emotional energy on them the reason is shoppers hate these type of reviews too because they don't give them the information that they're looking for they're really looking to see why don't you two like this game so if you care about this I don't don't put it outside of your mind III came back with a nice warm feeling for negative reviews after studying users it doesn't matter that much okay so after all that if they like you they put you on your wish list everything that I just described took 90 seconds let me go through and let's actually watch somebody do this in 90 seconds oh that looks really cute side note she is in my name because I said why your video is playing and that's why there's no hover so that's why is the middle ball it's five dollars lost robots is a new prequel chapter blah blah blah let's click it let's say you get a blah blah blah she said bought a lot so now she's looking at the page and we'll go through the picture oh look how cute that is super fast to the images super fast right what's the task get the trailer the tension war point-and-click single-player story rich cash what's it oh it's from the bare with me people oh yeah bear with me The Lost robos I have one of the bear with me this is so cute when did this come out July 31st let's take a look at the reviews you get the long description you see that curators anybody in my carry the list no oh why don't you like it I'll always look for the negative ones looking forward to playing that lone chapter so it's very short too short wanted more okay well I mean big deal it's five bucks guys what do you want see she hates nature as much as we do it's adorable it's point-and-click it's a known group bear with me series I know that series yeah that's adorable again that took 90 seconds it's really a fast process that happens you got to make sure your page is dead-on really easy to navigate so let's part look at part three and I call this know your genre because the most important thing is understanding what genre your game is and putting it straight up front so that users know your game genre okay a big misconception that new market people new to marketing is they think that it's like a used car salesman like when you're doing marketing you're trying to like convert somebody you actually are not what you're trying to do is find your tribe find the people who would be predisposed to like your game and proving to them that you are exactly their type of game and then what you're basically doing is this this sort of process now I put these shapes in to represent games that people like that maybe a person like I only like triangle shaped games or Pentagon shaped games I hate octagon shaped games and then when they are look at your steam page what they're doing is they're comparing your game to see if it matches their predisposed interests and if it does great they're gonna buy it but if your steam page is kind of this amorphous dog's breakfast of a conglomeration that's impossible to identify it's not like every part is gonna do it they're actually gonna compare they can't determine if it in something they like or if it's not and if they can't determine what it is they're just gonna toss it out you have to be very absolutely clear what your genre is so I'm gonna show you this is some what I did was any time they came to a page I just shut up and just let them speak what you're gonna see is a video of people looking at a steam page for the first time there's no video because I want to just to hear and to read what they say it's like super meatboy but with a little bit of 3d Orson's this chemist looks very similar to civilization so I think this is very interesting to me ah looks like FDR actually like this ones it looks like Mario Party no thank you reminds me of alien alien isolation a little bit not quite yeah seems to be some sort of like city building game but on a skyscraper doesn't interest me specifically it feels kind of night in the woods and I like that room I got the art style so pretty a real-time RTS city builder that's really the kind of combo I love to go for um i'm i've loved games like the settlers Age of Empires one of the things that we as Indies were always told us know your hooks be as unique as possible stand out shadow genres and guess what they didn't mention the hooks as the reason they like the game they mentioned the things that were the same I call them anchors that's just a term I came up with but people are very Shawn or focused and they're not excited about what your hook is all the time the first thing they want to know is what genre is this cut it to me straight what genre are you and so what I'm trying to say is your store page should be stripping out everything that your game is not and being absolutely clear focus on appealing to the type of people who like your genre know the genre the top game in your genre did you notice that they kept referencing other games like this guy who said it's like an f2 out of FTL flat testing the light I actually liked those type of games he didn't say like an FTL clone get out of here no he was excited that this game was sustained as an FTL so don't think like that we really need to start kind of going back and being sure of our genres okay and they go quick tangent and this is to show how important making of the genre is now I'm not making fun of this this is I think this is really cool so indie romance authors are some of the smartest markers you've ever seen and I really take a lot of inspiration from them so we complain a lot because steam has 35,000 games right the apocalypse games everywhere right guess what any romance authors are on Amazon which has 8 million books I'm not making that number up that is literally it's 8 million books on Amazon they look at our 35,000 they say oh you sweet child so how the hell did they get their books sold when there's a million books and some of these India romance authors make a million dollars a year so let me show you ok these are in the romance book covers I they all look the same team right there's this very special language going on here okay I'm just gonna walk you through this real fast and you're gonna you're gonna it's gonna be life-changing you okay again I'm not making fun this I think this is awesome okay so there's a very sub-genre of romance called Highland romance romancing a Scotsman I guess if you see tartan a sword and a castle in the background you know you got Highland romance shifter romance which is like werewolves but why stop at wolves we got bears dragons tigers if you see an animal behind a hunk that is a shift or romance there's another sub-genre called reverse harem romance instead of multiple girls it's multiple guys you know that it's a reverse harem if there's a bunch of guys in the back I love that name nalin studs okay so sub sub sub roman genres they go even they have even more specific tastes and now I'm not going to tell you what this one is you can just identify it because you've learned the language well we have we have a wolf from the front multiple studs in the back what is that shifter reverse harem you know the show okay this one here wolf in the back the guys weren't in a kilt with a nice pardon and there's a castle in the background guess what this is shifter Highlander you know this romance you figured it out you know the language now now I wrote a whole blog post on this and how to look at genres for romance novel novels and this guy on Twitter was like won't even be indie anymore and I kind of I get him I get it you know those covers are cheesy I'm not saying we literally need to do that although those would be more fun with it but here's what to learn from romance in the authors and this is the key point here you got to know your audiences kinks learn what they are romance authors have studied the sub sub sub genre kinks of their audience you should learn those two and then they put those kinks straight up they know the language that people are looking for so that it's crystal clear be absolutely clear with your genre so your shoppers will not have any questions it's so that in an instant you can identify the genre and like when you're coming off of a romance novel like Bridges of Madison County you don't come to the book and say maybe I'm into this I think this might be my Shana you're like you're either in for the bear or you're not get out of here okay and so I think we should have similar confidence on our pages be very very clear what you are and just put it straight up there and we've got this actually in games right now look at these simulator games you know what kind of simulators they are you've got a farming simulator truck simulator just in an instant and look at the font they're all very similar you can tell the genre based on these signifiers that you've got to learn same thing we used to make fun of these FPS covers that all look the same but guess what you know a first person shooter cover the second you see it we got to learn the tropes of your genre same thing with UI when you see the UI it is like those signifiers that are in the romance novels you got to learn the tropes and the UI tropes of your genre okay again this goes back to coercion you're not converting somebody to try and love that bear book you are speaking to the audience who loves bear shift or romance you want people to say when they see your game this is the game that I've always wanted thank you for giving this wonderful gift to me all right sorry for that diversion let's go back to steam okay after all this did that did person by that game that they bought on the wish that they added to the wish list no no it was just a wish list then they closed the browser and they they entered their day when do they actually buy steam sales if you have a game on Steam you know most sales come in during the big seasonal sales so I did part 4 part 2 of this of the study and I'm gonna dip into how to manage a Steam sale so I'm gonna get you from how to get wish lists how to go from their wish list to get you into the card how to manage your sales pricing so that it's you know appropriate for people who are shopping during a sale and how to get from the cart to their library how to actually get out of the cart and get purchased so let's do part 1 of this okay so for this next part I had six participants and I did a separate study that was only part of the Halloween sale so what I did was I got everybody who was game to do another part three of them were from the previous study that's why they're orange and then I found three new people who would do this screen share with me and I told them don't we got a Halloween sale coming up don't look at the store if the Steam sale starts don't talk to your friends about it please don't open steam don't open those wish list emails that you get I want to see your first impression so they were really good and within the first two days of the Steam sale I got the first impressions of people shopping on Steam during this Halloween sale so it's the way this here's how they navigated during the Steam sale so they're usually a takeover page on Steam they browse it just like they do with the hover the mouse catcher is where they hold over a look at the hover same deal same rules apply the next part is they go and they manage their wish list so they switch over to the man the wish list page I'm gonna show you an actual video of somebody browsing their wish list during a steam sale here goes let's count do you see it wasn't price it was discount these are the usual games they are pretty much always on sale I can buy this one how do you know because I I have the notification son and whenever there's a game on sale I get an email there are some games they I really know by memory that they have been on sale a lot for example this one is say every time those aside every time this one has been on sale a few thanks to I recently there was a battery you liked it I'm not really sure what's decent voice in my wishlist but I'll look at it later did you hear that last one not sure why this is on my wish list I'll look at it later I've noticed over and over again people don't remember why they have games on their wish list it was like there were new games to them we love as Indies we think oh sue knew somebody wishlist our game they just think and pray every night that the sale gods are gonna come down and put their game that favorite game and I just wish list on sale that is not happening people have a lot of games on the wish list they don't remember how they got on there so you have to treat your page during a sale assuming that people who have not they're coming for the first time even if they wish listed your game so you want to make it look fresh because I noticed a lot of people when they were going through their wish list and they look at the page they wanted to make sure that it wasn't a dead game so do stuff to kind of freshen up your page before a Steam sale that includes like posting a little update alert theme your capsule to the holiday put a Santa hat on somebody post an announcement that also will show up in the little banners of things that have recently been updated upload a small patch so that you can see that the game was recently updated and common in the forums make sure the forums are still active so you really want to make your page kind of freshen it up for the big sales now he joked about it you heard him he said this game is always on sale well guess what he knew those games that were always on sale he didn't know the game that was not on sale I don't know the strategy you might prefer to do fewer sales or more sales I'll get to that later it's up to you your business model but I got to tell you when you do frequent sales when every time there's a sale in your games on sale people become familiar with it they're not going to have that aspect or they're going to say what game is this again how did this end up on my Steam page why are my wish listing this you want to be familiar for your users okay so how to do pricing let's look at this a lot of the power users actually use second party sites like GG deals or steam B DB and what they're looking for something called historic low those sites will actually track if your gains dollar amount it's not based on percentage whether the dollar amount has never been reached before because it kind of adds a fear of missing out element so if you time your big steam sales with the historic lows you get a double punch it's kind of like a multiplier effect and people are more encouraged to do it also be careful because historical lows are a limited resource once you go to one price point you can't be a historic low again for that so it's kind of stair step your price changes downwards don't go too deep too fast because you miss out on a whole bunch of historic lows they'll also check your history those those third-party sites will actually show these little histograms so you they will see is that how often does this go on sale and are we in the real deep discount because if you're in a deep discount they're gonna buy your game so let's be strategic about this all-time lows are very non-renewable resource okay what they do now when they're in steam page they get buyers fever and so they're their fingers kind of hovering on the Buy button they're not sure if they're gonna buy it so they're looking again at your steam page to see if they trust your game and here's what they do they look at a couple key things they look at the developer and publisher to see if they remember them if they've noticed them or kind of identify the publisher of course people are gonna know Xbox game studios but they want to see if they remember who you are the other thing they look at is this kind of more from more from section and again they want to see did they play another one of your games so if your games like in a series multiple sequels they want to see wait did I play this game was this part of something else remember on the video she said oh it's from the bear with me people she knew some of the those folks you're just building trust that you're gonna stick around you're a trustworthy developer now what does this mean stay alive live to make more than one game I know I know you're focused all on this game but if you can't survive to your next one and or if your first one doesn't sell very well it's okay your second one will have that boost of having more reputable coverage because you your other game is going to show up and out more like this so it's kind of you're building that reputation so please don't quit after your first game even if it doesn't sell well I know it's it's hard but please do ok so then they do this genre relevance evaluation back to the identification what they'll do you know how I said you got to match up just like a romance novel they're looking for the genre to make sure so what they do is they check those bar on the bottom right that's a very important bar before they buy they'll check this and what they're doing is in this top part where it says similar to games you've played that helps them identify that genre it's just like that guy that said hey this is like an FTL if they that game had an FTL in that icon in that section he'd be like that is perfect the other thing that they check and this is super duper important they look to see their friends recommended or not because not only do they know the genres that they like they know there's honors of their friends and the friends that like certain genres so if they see somebody that they trust who also likes the games they like recommending it that is a such a bonus and if a friend recommends against it but they know that that person has different tastes in them they're like oh it's ok he likes FPS is I don't like FPS is it's ok that he hates this game ok so they found it you've you're trustworthy dev what do they do they add it to their cart do they buy it hell no they still after all of that you are still not clear this is the final part how do you get out of the cart and into their library because it turns out that your steam cart is actually a secondary wish list and so what they do is they'll actually stop and say ok I've loaded up my card for the Steam sale I'm gonna take a little break I'm gonna check with my friends I want to see what's gonna happen here and so what they do is they step away and they call all their friends and they say I'm thinking of getting this game I actually saw this happen so one of the participants I was watching she was considering sundered and what she did was she messaged her friend who also had a good review for sundered and she in discord this is in discord she set him a screenshot of sundered and she said hey I'm thinking of buying this and he said this go for it and then she bought it imagine that all the marketing that had to be done for this to happen those three magic words go for it I don't know how we sell any games at all this is how much it takes to get a game sold and that comes to the next part which is word-of-mouth you need to turn your current customers people who've already bought your game into advocates for you you need to be offering good support be friendly don't just run once you have their money it's ongoing because they're gonna be recommending your game the next time there's a sale and somebody comes to them and says hey do you recommend this person's game you better hope that they say yes they better hope that they say go for it okay second part cart problems this is kind of out of our hands but it really matters here okay we know when a steam style starts they get this email that says you got a wish list on an item on sale what are you gonna do this is a very powerful way of doing it but guess what they put the game they may have put it in there I got this comment from one of the participants that I was studying I put Grim Dawn franchise in my cart but forgot to actually purchase it major oh my god they didn't actually go back to their steam page after that cart after they checked with all their friends this is something in the online retail industry called abandoned cart recovery when people abandon the cart they need to be called back to say hey don't forget the sale is ending steam does not have abandoned cart recovery let me show you this the worldwide everything like Amazon all online retailers estimated it's like 75% of all people will have stuff left over their cart and never buy it this article that I linked below actually said gaming's pretty safe with this they only have a 64 percent abandoned right only 64 percent abandoned oh my god but the good news is they found that if you engage in like email marketing and re-engage them say hey by the way sale is ending you got some items left in the cart do you want it they were able to recover ten almost eleven percent of people were to come back and actually finish the purchase eleven percent now that doesn't sound like much but if you go back to your Steam sale go back to the last sale take whatever you earn in that last Steam sale multiply that by 10 percent add that on that's what you've missed out because steam does not have a abandoned cart recovery it is a big thing like it it wouldn't be that much that you would need to do like if we just had an email that steam would send out like let's say a day before the Steam sale ends and just says hey you've got something left in your card do you want to pick pick up this game it's it's almost there there'll be a total major you've avoided according to that that user they want this they didn't want to miss out on that sale now next time you have a meeting with valve if you've got one of those behind closed doors and they ask for suggestions say please implement an abandoned car recovery email sequence they're gonna look at you sideways and say a what explain it to them Chom Chom what I'm Amanda abandoned car recovery email sequences hopefully they implement it we can't hook there's probably some technical reason they can't do it I don't know but then the next best thing that we can do is plan a big marketing push at the end of the sale make sure that you re up on your social media your email let's say hey sale ends tomorrow don't forget to pick up if you got something left in your car don't forget to buy it it's a all we got we can't only do so much bug valve about it hopefully what fixes this okay so part five how to turn those wishlist errs into actual buyers okay so I I published a lot of my friends that I just talked to you about on Gamasutra and I got a lot of comments very good comments that said well the way you were doing the screen share and everything you're probably influencing them that's probably people didn't buy as much as what you saw and this is something called the Hawthorne effect which is when somebody watches a person being watched changes their behavior and it dates back to the the old factory days they wanted to see if they lowered the lights a food increase or decrease productivity but it was managers who are doing the observation so of course you're gonna work faster when your managers watching you that's besides the point but this is how we're gonna test this and what I did was not another screen share for part three of this study I did a diary study and what a diary study is is I took seven of the participants two of them those are those orange people from the previous studies and then I found five new people and what I did was every week I ascended a survey the how-to questions what did you buy last week and why and what did you wish list last week and how did you hear about it that's all I asked them I said I'm in a Google Form like this and I sent it for three months starting December 15th and then adjust today March Nitin so I would get these little stories back because they were like little diary entries and they're almost like hemingway-esque and their simplicity and they're just earnestness seven days to die this early access game has become a favorite of mine this was the 11th copy that I purchased this time as a Christmas gift for a friend God you better hope that you get this customer she bought 11 copies of this game here's another one monopoly plus I saw it after looking up word games to play with my daughter in another state it is a game that I have seen on sale for Humble Bundle man that when that one gets me every time I read helpless so these are the type of comments that I got here's one for this one listen to this dream demon crawl saw about it on the discount on discord and it looks like something I'd love to play will likely buy it before the end of the sale now buy it before the end of the sale guess what I did I waited til the end of the sale way out well afterwards I over and I emailed a guy and I said hey demon crawl did you ever buy it nope I ended up for kidding about it and realized too late like a few hours after the sale ended I'm damned in cart this is what I'm talking about we got to get a bandit card talk to steam abandon cart okay so again I did three months of surveys that turned out to be thirteen surveys I observed or got little messages about 229 which listed decisions 278 buying decisions that's five hundred and seven of those micro stories so what I did was I went through and I tagged him based on what they said whether I got it from discord or steam or a bundle who told them about the game all that stuff here's what I found here's the research okay so the top list is all the participants the seven participants just underneath I'm listing them in columns so participant a bought 24 games between December 15th and March 9th participant D bought 86 games in that three months all the way over to like participant Oh about 62 games during that period this is purchase this is how many they wishlist did so a about 2700 baht 32 reads like that I'm gonna break it down based on all the things they did again these are the only purchases and wish list during that time period okay how many what percentage based on Steam because some people played switch games or they bought Xbox games I include those in the survey and attract them so how many of them included Steam games it's pretty high number 42 percent 53 percent 76 percent of the games that were bought during this time period were for steam I counted anything that was Humble Bundle even if they get a steam key from Humble as a separate thing and I'll show that in a minute you might notice participant l had zero Steam games he was boycotting steam at the beginning and I was like wonder if he's gonna stick to his boycott he did he did not buy any steam games during that three month period so very good on him okay so how many of these purchases were from Humble Bundle turns out a very high percentage of people get their games from Humble Bundle so if you notice D and K they have very large inventories of games that they purchased that's because they're big buyers of Humble Bundle games fanatical but there was another bundle that a lot of people bought off of some people were not bundle buyers like M&N they just didn't get any bundles now let's check social media so I one of the questions like did you buy this game and why if they said oh I bought it on Twitter I saw somebody on Twitter or tweet about the game so I bought it how many nobody nobody mentioned that they found a game based on Twitter let's talk about discord how many one person heard about a game on discord and then bought it and then read it one person one person bought a game because they saw it on reddit now that's kind of strange but if you remember top of the funnel bottom of the funnel I always talk about that stuff but nobody I always say nobody sees the game for the first time and then buys it that's true and that's what this study did so I looked at the wish list I looked at top of the funnel how many people wish list in the game and claimed that they wishlist it because of Twitter so same thing let's see three people three people said they saw a game on Twitter and so they wish list of it there scored a little bit higher six people and then read it 12 now participant D loves Reddit so he's a very heavy writer user but he was the only one and said no I found a lot of these people on reddit they just don't shop for games on reddit okay what about streamers what how many people buy again is because of streamers so let's look at wish lists so because of what they saw on Steam like a streamer do it about that that's not great but it's something how many purchases based on what they saw on a streamer not many three people see it on purchase really it's a wishlist to purchase conversion now I think part of it might be that they wish listed at long time ago so if they may in in my data they didn't actually say that they bought it because of watching somebody on YouTube but I really think wish lists don't straight convert to purchases based on on streamers okay now I've mentioned friends all the time these are kind of what if anybody tagged a friend if they said hey I have friends who play this so I bought it because of that I did that I also counted if they bought a game for a friend this will be it if they were gifted a game any that I tagged at as a friend by so how many games did they buy because of a friend recommendation let's see a pretty high amount some of these participants like L&N 50 percent of their games came from friend recommendations friends are very very important in buying games what about wish lists just as high a third in some cases now you might notice participant D does not actually have any friends no he has friends I actually asked him I said you okay maybe have friends he does he just doesn't have gamer friends all those friends do other activities who knows what they do but they don't play games together okay how many gamers how many of these participants bought games at full price zero zero people bought games at full price isn't that astounding these people wait for sales I know it's not a surprise but I got it looking at all those there's a surprise okay so what gets people from wish list to purchase how do they actually do it I got one of these comments because I'm always wondering like how do I convert somebody from being wish listing into actually buying it and this here's this guy he said star devalue was tempted but I have some unfinished business with one of my Harvest Moon games on we will finish that first before buying stardew valley what like we have to now compete with we like who knows why people buy games you there's no reason we just have to basically keep pushing on it keep pushing on it you just have to market all the time because who knows when some he's gonna finish that we game I don't know what to do I don't know what to do so games have a long life cycle stay alive stay a lot just whatever may occur okay so what actually moved the needle after doing all this research okay bundles were the highest percentage that converted to actually purchasing something next down was friends now bundles we get like fractions of a sentence some of those bundles so it doesn't quite count so the number one thing is friends now full-price purchases were zero which means sales actually drive a lot but i can't quite identify like how many sales came from not being mentioned on friends and bundles it's kind of like asking somebody who are asking a fish about water they don't even notice it a lot of these participants wish lists and things and bad things just because they were on the steam front page and all that kind of stuff so i think those are the major drivers but the things we could kind of control our purchases because of friends and getting your game in bundles so here's kind of the top recommendations based on the second round of research make a really good game that people recommend stars around that that's the most important thing people aren't going to recommend your game if it isn't good that's why we say start with a good game to market okay develop a plan for word-of-mouth marketing we gotta invest in how do we get our games shareable not through social media because apparently they don't do it through social media just make sure that friends know maybe bundle two keys so that somebody will give a key to a friend who knows but think of ways to do word-of-mouth marketing put your game on sale a lot we know that people only buy it on sale i told you that when when they frequent sales happen they your game is more further mined and eventually put in an a bundle maybe a windowing system eventually it'll end up in a bundle because that really does drive people to buy your game and i guess just wait for people to finish all their games on week who knows i don't know okay wrap it up let's do this i keep all this research while i was doing i kept thinking I'm like I'm gonna have to present this to a bunch of these I'm gonna have to tell them to like put their game on sale a lot I'm gonna have to tell them to stick to John Rizzo be too crazy don't have too many hooks don't meet you out there just stick to genre conventions like I keep thinking of that guy like why didn't be indie anymore it's true like I wonder about this but here's the thing this is kind of what I came around to your steam page we saw with that woman who went through the steam page it last 90 seconds they shop for 90 seconds on your store Paige they are gonna forget your store page by the end of it but your game will live on so this steam you can be cheesy and trite on your steam page that's not your art your steam page is not your art and a key thing I kind of realize this when I heard about this so this is not a truce famous 20th century author you know one of the greatest thinkers we've got in the 20th century um it turns out here he is his first book was something called remembrance of things past right smart guy okay um for Marcel Proust a leaf agarró as the front page there isn't his steam page equivalently if you wanted to sell 20th century literature to Frenchmen this is where you put it and he got a bunch of front page reviews for his his remnants of things past right well they recently had an auction for some of Proust old letters and they were going through his letters and they found out that Proust actually paid people the equivalent of nine hundred dollars in today's dollars to write favorable reviews for him on the on the front page of the slave agarra now I'm not steamed I'm not telling them to buy reviews I'm not if you're steamed um don't kick my games off steam what I'm actually saying is he hustled he hustled and he knew that sometimes you have to really change your policies in order to get your art scene and really what Marcel Proust kind of did was we don't remember it it wasn't it totally dug deep into his letters that we found out that his page was trite and that his his his items were bad we remember his art not what he did on the pho Garo nobody remembers what he did on those pagará so what I'm saying is just get that hustle do it so he actually actually got his friend who painted this portrait name listed off to the left so I don't butcher the French he got him to write one of the reviews so use your resources don't cheat the system don't buy reviews but your store page is not your art separate those two please your page is not your art be a little bit cliche okay I called this talk empathize with 15 because I don't know we look at all these sales charts we look at these number of reviews and we just hate these people that just say nope and we kind of hate steam and but after watching this and reading stuff like this person who wanted to play games with her daughter in another state I don't know I kind of got this feeling there's this feeling called saunder which is basically that says everybody every random passerby actually has a full life and I thought about that when I did this research is every negative review they probably having a bad day or something and all those votes are probably from somebody else who's also having a bad day and so what I'm telling you is it's kind of cool down about doing this stuff go do what I did talk to seeing people not the crazy ones not the mean ones but find people and talk to him in and don't just treat them like a number like oh this many up votes as many down those really learn your audience and I think it's gonna be a real positive feeling for you so please do it again if you want that steam checklist go to our website how to market a game.com slash steam checklist i'll send you a free version of that if you set it for my newsletter if you have questions this is a weird GDC this year so i'll answer them on twitter please do it thank you very much i appreciate your time thanks for coming out I love you all have a good day then

Channel: GDC

Views: 28,379

Rating: 4.968389 out of 5

Keywords: gdc, talk, panel, game, games, gaming, development, hd, design, steam, marketing

Id: UJiv14uPOac

Length: 58min 0sec (3480 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 03 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Wacov]

Awesome, I feel like a lot of this stuff is super non-obvious. Found the comparison with romance novels really interesting.

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