How To Sell More Games on Steam! (Store Page Optimization)

in this video we'll have a look at a bunch of different steam pages and for that i invited chris tsukowski a professional marketer in the game development scene steam pages have some basic things they have to do the first one is just tell you what type of game it is and what makes it unique the second thing that your steam page has to do is tell steam it's almost i always consider it like your programming steam to show your game he has already talked at gdc a couple of times and he's also spent several hours of his life just watching people shop for games on steam your store patch is obviously the most important thing you have to nail if you want to get a lot of copies sold for your game so this is kind of how people browse a steam page they'll first come in and they're going to look at your capsule image steam has this kind of bluish tinge you have a nice complementary color there that really pops so that looks really good this is what happens is people will actually not watch trailers and the reason i say this stuff is i actually did a project where i followed about 15 different people shop on steam so what they do is they first kind of click through the screenshots real fast and they're just looking for like how do i play this game first off i can see clearly that this is a platform here is where i've noticed your hook right up front which is this cool thing where the ai can actually like anticipate and i didn't get that you know i went through your whole page i didn't get it until i watched the trailer right here at 10 seconds we can't trust that people watch trailers and so now i'm looking at your steam page i'm like okay there's a really unique hook did they convey it correctly so when i looked at your short description it says an evil a ai tries to kill you and then you said an experience about artificial intelligence and the future of humanity i know for you that sounds like oh that's great i'm talking about this unique hook but if you think about it steam games especially are all about artificial intelligence that's trying to kill you that's a very common thing well here here's the thing is your short description and i'm going to tell this for other pages that i'm reviewing today your short description is about explaining things that are not story and not mood when people are shopping on steam they're not looking for story they really care about the gameplay so when i look at short descriptions i'm always looking for people to explain the gameplay and so i think you should be very very specific not just try and make this sound like it's a narrative beat that there's an ai chasing you really say something about how the level changes or the fact that you've coded the level to change to try and kill you that sort of thing so it doesn't sound like just a narrative beat why do you think it's so important that players understand the game right out of the gate because i can also see the other perspective where you could kind of say maybe it's good to have a little bit of intrigue and have people figure it out but i guess that's not the way to go on steam right yeah in my experiences people have 45 seconds at most if they really like your game to sell them they have 45 seconds to browse it and what they do when they browse your page is they just kind of skim you know i read the whole thing they don't they're looking for verbs and nouns so they're looking at oh action platformer artificial intelligence and they're just looking for those words so they need you need to hit them over the head and here's one thing i i tell indies your store page is not your game when you play a game you're like immersed in this world right you're like trying to like get the feeling all over them to wash over and like have the slow roll story you don't want to be coy on your steam page it's not your narrative like you just want to hit them over the head with the basics of what it is because people don't want they don't want your story to come at them on your steam page they're just like shopping like at the grocery store where they're like looking at boxes and they're like oh does this cereal look good yes no okay i'm moving they don't but then when they sit down for dinner or to eat the cereal in the morning that's when they want it to like okay yeah so basically at first glance they need to see okay this is the kind of cereal i was looking for let me put it into my bag yeah that makes a lot of sense and that's why you don't do a cereal when you're making a cereal box you don't try and appeal to everybody you like say okay i'm the person trying to get healthy i'm the person shopping for my kid i'm the person who has a medical condition and needs like a special fiber diet or something you know there's like different things you don't try and make a cereal that appeals to everybody and so you got to be very specific with what you're trying to approach if that makes sense yeah that makes sense okay cool okay so that's just in the first few seconds everything we explained happens in about two seconds so when people shop they're just gonna click through they're actually gonna do this and i watched them and i actually uh have watched people do this they're going to click through the trailer like this this is how they watch your trailer they're just going to click through it because what they're looking for is verbs they're like oh okay you jump and you dodge lasers okay and then like this and they're looking for gameplay now you're doing a good job because you have gameplay throughout i always see a problem when trailers uh have like slow cinematics that don't tell you what type of game it is you're doing a great job with having gameplay right through your trailer and it's easy to tell what's going on so good job on that so again remember how i told you that they're trying to figure out what type of game this is is this they can see it's a platformer clearly because they can see a guy on these platforms now they're trying to figure out is it a metroidvania is it a roguelike is it a super meat boy type of game my hunch is it's kind of like a super meat boy is that correct yeah i guess the the hardcore precision platformer kind of people will have the most fun with it it also has difficulty setting so you can also play it more casually but it's it's probably goes more in the super meat boy direction yeah for sure good good okay so here's what i see when i look at these tags now your tags are super important difficult platformer 2d those are three very important tags right there to kind of tell that i'm going to hit this plus button to see all the tags you've applied and i already see the first problem here is you don't have 20 tags i can tell because 20 tags go down to about right here so you're missing tags which means you're not telling the steam algorithm everything about your game so for instance there is a tag called precision platformer so let me see if i can see it yeah that would that would be a very good tag yeah i see i think when i did my research it said somewhere that you should only do 15 tags because once you have more it will be randomly shuffled or something like that they changed the algorithm within probably like 2020 i think is when they changed the tagging algorithm a little bit it's i actually recommend that people tag their game about once every month to two months just kind of go through and check your tags and here's what why i say that if i scroll down so tags control what shows up down here the games that are more like this and what i can typically do is if i go down without even looking at tags i can tell how good your game is tagged so for instance i see super meat boy that's actually a good sign that means uh you've tagged but look at their text they've got precision platformer platformer difficult indie you want to tell the steam algorithm my game is like this one because when people shop for steam games look there's sections all over the place where steam is saying this game is like this game this game is like this game it sounds weird but when you're marketing your game on steam you actually want to say i'm more like this game i'm like this game because steam is a recommendation engine it says oh this game in this game because if it knows i played a lot of the the end is nigh which i have i actually like precision platformers it's going to start recommending games that are more like the andes 9 because it knows i like them it's not going to recommend precision platformers to somebody who only likes you know like city builders like i only play city builders they're not going to recommend the end is now because people who like city builders are slower paced more thinking whereas people who like precision platformers are like you know hand going fast going crazy that sort of thing does that make sense yeah that makes a lot of sense for sure knowing that you actually want your game to be similar to other games you want it to be easy to sound like the competition which sounds weird but it's true what i see is when i go down here to super meat boy i see they have precision platformer platformer difficult indie you want to have very similar tags to them because other games like cuphead yes cuphead is difficult but it's like a shooter and it's it's got other things going for it that i don't think your game is quite like cuphead geometry dash is a very popular game and i actually think your game is very similar like graphically it is all those kind of things look they've got precision platformer difficult those sort of things what i recommend people do is pick the games because you kind of know you play a lot of games so you know what games are similar to yours yeah go find those games and look at their tags of your game versus theirs and just make sure that their top five because the top five tags are the most most important match their top five tags that are super important yeah that makes sense maybe as a little side question for the viewers how do texts on steam even work because it always confused me a little bit as a developer you can kind of apply text to your game but then all of the players who visit your store page can kind of apply tags as well so how does all of that work yes so you as a developer when you sign into your developer account if you go to will you snail as a developer you can add tags but don't do that don't do it through this menu it's it's the bad way of doing it you want to go sign in through steamworks and there's a there's something called edit tags start tag wizard and it's a step by step and it allows you to pick tags when you do it through there the tags that you pick through that wizard count more for steam steam will say i trust what the developer says more than what randos say because random people don't know how to tag games they don't know what you're trying to do marketing they don't know what you're trying to position your game to they're just i hate that i actually hate the fact that steam lets random people tag your game because they don't know what they're doing but your tags count for more because steam trusts your choices okay okay i see here's the other thing is the top five tags that you pick are super duper important steam believes whatever you pick the top five are are more important than the other ones okay and here's one problem that i'm going to yell at all of all the pages i'm going to review you got the indie tag right up front get rid of that indie tag i know you're an indie but here is why the indie tag is the number one used tag on all of steam i i think it's somewhere like 75 percent of games on steam have the indie tag in them now the reason you tag your game is so that you can tell steam why your game is unique but you've just wasted one of the top five most important places to distinguish your game with the most generic tag the way i like to think about it is let's say you witnessed a crime right and the police come to you and they say did you see who did it and you said yes and they're like can you describe this suspect to me and you're like two legs two arms a head body and they're like that literally describes everybody can you give me anything more specific and they're like uh wore a shirt you're trying to tell steam like this is what makes my game unique so that when there's a specific game and they want to recommend a game next to that they know what it is so when you say indie it's like you're saying the person had two legs and you're like well i know there's some people that only have one link but two legs that doesn't really narrow it down so i always recommend indies get rid of the indie tag and the other thing you can do when you sign in on your developer there's it's super secret i always recommend that developers indies ban tags that don't apply to their game because those randos i i sell games on steam i have a couple games platformers precision platformers that's what kind of game i make some people tag it weird stuff like some random people on the internet tagged my game as nudity even though i don't have nudity i think it's a troll i don't know why okay but somebody some rando tagged my game as nudity so you can go in when you sign in your developer account and there's this flag here and when you click it it's really hard to see but it's right next to the plus thing it bans tags so i go in and i ban that nudity tag and then i don't know how it works on steam i think it's like if somebody tries to tag my game as nudity it just doesn't count okay um so that's why i recommend that people go in through that wizard through steamworks to tag their game because um you got to do it every month and i usually do it after a big sale because when a lot of people come to your page they're going to start adding weird tags and you're like that's not what i'm trying to go for so though that's a couple of things so does that work that makes sense okay interesting so i'm going to move on any questions let's move on we have to speed it up a little bit what i like about your i call the long description but it's really about this game is you have uh images a lot of people just dump a ton of text in here and nobody reads that text you can do animated gifs and i recommend animated gifs if your game is kind of simple looking not to say that yours is simple looking but if it's a game that could be interpreted as being like low quality or something you know like typically pixel art 2d games have this problem because people don't steam shoppers think 2d and pixel art games are kind of like asset flips or low quality so an animated gif that shows cool particle effects or cool animation really helps to have animated gifs it kind of makes people think oh this is it looks good it moves well you know it's got that squash and stretch it's got that kind of juice to it um so i like to use animated gifs oh i think everybody should use animated gifs but especially if you've got that okay so this kind of animated gifs are always better or is it um whatever basically whatever feels better i would recommend at least one or two anime gifts and then you can do still images for the rest i don't see why not to do animating yes they're very effective and what i would do and this is up to you but i would explain and you kind of do a dodge my traps you know this advanced ai algorithm i think that's good but nobody really reads like i think this is actually kind of what i was looking for my advanced view i know where you're going to go and i'll predict your movement it might be neat to show this in the anime gif because when this all clicked for me when i saw your trailer but it was only when i saw the trailer and i saw that like oh it pops up a spike when i'm about to land there that might be well shown in an animated gif if you could kind of boil that one second down to an animated gif that's constantly moving and then people can just watch it and say ah i see the ai actually inserts a spike when you're gonna land yeah so i think that's a really helpful thing that you should do what do you think is the purpose of the about section down there are people still trying to figure out what the game is down there or or are they more like um i'm already interested in this game let me see if they can convince me to really buy it or what's the main purpose of the about section in your opinion when they're on your steam page they already think your game is interesting so they are looking for things not to to make them not interested so when they saw your capsule and they clicked it they're like this game looks interesting so they're already their mindset is kind of like okay it looks neat and it's kind of curious what kind of game is it and so they're looking for reasons not to like your game not reasons to like your game so what you're trying to do with this about this game section now it used to be text that nobody read but then people figured out let's add images and gifs think of this as like a trailer that's just broken up that's what i like to think of about this game is it's just a trailer that auto plays because the trailer people have to click it and it has to load it has to do the slow intro and people always put their logos in the front which you should never do don't put your logo in the front and a lot of people have just gotten burned by bad trailers that are slow to start i treat this section almost as like a trailer just treat this like a trailer and here's the thing i know it sounds like you're being redundant like oh i already told them in a trailer you can't trust that people watch the trailer you got to tell them like three times you're telling somebody you have to tell them here you have to tell them with your trailer you have to tell them with your screenshots and you have to tell them with this section down here and you've got to repeat yourself the same thing over and over i my game predicts where you're going to jump and it puts a spike under you that's essentially what you need to tell your audience like three four times on this one steam page i wonder if that's even something i can tell purely with screenshots at the very top what do you do if you have like a a game with a little bit of a more abstract concept that people won't understand from just looking at screenshots here's the thing is your trailer and your screenshots give you the mood they kind of give you that like ah this is what the feel of it is like from here i can tell okay it's gonna be kind of like glitchy it's gonna be aggressive platforming it's gonna have like weird like glowy effects okay i kind of get the mood here that's what your screenshots and trailer are telling me but then over here this explains like what do you do and that's why i'm i was hoping that you would put more information about like that yeah like what it literally means to have the ai control you yeah um also this well this will kind of give you that context so that's what you need to do is why is this different yeah that makes sense awesome cool then that's it for the steam page i also have my steam page analytics open here like um are you familiar with the steam page analytics and if so what would you say are the most important numbers you need to pay attention to the most important thing is wish lists you're trying to get as many wishlists as you can before you launch if you're really serious about this and you wanna this is for everybody else out there if you're really serious and you wanna make a big impact on steam you need at least about ten thousand ten thousand wishlists when you launch that 10 000 number is because steam starts kind of showing you more when you get to about 10 000. looks like you have 18 000 you're pretty good the steam algorithm has recently changed to hide asset flips it's like really built around that and one of the ways they do that is they look to see how many wishlists you have and they see how many sales you convert right up front and they're really aggressive if you don't reach certain targets they will start hiding your game more and more yikes and that usually happens right around the 10 000 wish list mark is when they you're on the good side of the bad side of steam okay so i was wondering are there any other hidden numbers here like um click-through rates or stuff like that like i've never really yeah and click-through rate is hard because it changes a lot with steam and it changes depending on whether you have a promotion like let's say you get covered by a big streamer and they dump a lot of traffic on you that distorts your numbers and it's hard to tell whether they have a good click-through rate or not so i typically look at if you're not running any big promotions how many wishlists do you get per week and can we go look at that let's say did you run any big promotion like did you drop a big youtube about your game or anything yeah obviously i'm like i promote my wishlists and youtube videos all the time see you're you're an expert youtuber so you things are a little bit different for you but what i typically look at is if i haven't done any big promotion like you know sometimes there's a festival a big streamer covers you is there a period of time that you think is kind of like a resting rate when you haven't done much well we definitely have some resting rates in here i think let's see if i can find the graph by the way do you know if you if you're allowed to show all of this data because i've seen some disclaimers on steam sometimes that blah blah this website's confidential and so on do you know if that applies to the statistics as well yeah steam allows you to show anything you want um and i could show you the exact blog post they they've published a blog post that says you can do anything oh that's awesome okay yeah so these are my my wishlist here the blue curve and basically what you can definitely see is that it correlates very very much with my youtube views so that's good it's yeah that's a hard thing to do not many indies can do what you do so okay so what i would look at so you see right around september 2020 you see how it's kind of low i consider that your resting rate so if you just shut down your youtube channel didn't do anything and you just let steam promote your game that's your resting rate so it looks like you get about 15 to 16 per day that's kind of what i'm saying 20 right around there yep your 20s to 16. so i like to look at a seven day rolling average just because you see how it's spiky like it's always kind of like bouncing around of course yeah i like to look i kind of averaged it together so let's just say what is it well you got about seven in there like see right there you got about let's say 15 what's my math yeah so let's say you do 15. 15 times 7 is like 100 a week let's say yeah that is really good i gotta tell you if you're at home watching this you have to be an expert youtuber to kind of get to that level so what steam does i think and this is kind of there is when you send a lot of traffic to your steam page steam's like oh this this game's got something let's show it some more to get about 100 a week is really good i only see kind of top tier indie games get about that especially for a platformer game platformer games are really hard to market because there's so many of them and a lot of first-time developers make you know platformer games typically what i've seen is about for a platformer game 35 to 50 wishlists per seven days that's like typical indie platformers the steam audience really doesn't like platformers very much just to go there but okay you're doing very well i can say you're doing very well with your promotion so did you do any festivals or anything no no no nothing just youtube videos because i see a huge spike in the beginning like uh kind of in the may 2020 that right there was that when you launched your game what's different there versus later that is when i got a lot of views on youtube so that was a killer video basically basically i had had a viral video or two and that's where these spikes are coming from like i've seen i know a couple indies that can pull off the youtube promotion you gotta have the personality you gotta have a long big channel i've seen a couple indies it's effective but you have to have the personality for it yeah of course you have to be right for it what would you say are some other ways to get some people to your steam page and to generate some wish lists okay so the big ones are festivals we're kind of in the middle of festival season right now we just had mix we got packs coming up every four months steam runs a seasonal festival where upcoming games you can upload a demo and then they'll host your demo you can only do one of those per year steam will hard lock you for 365 days you can only do one each one of those festivals will get you around 700 to a thousand wish lists somewhere around there a streamer if you get covered by a big streamer let's say like jonas or somebody you can expect anywhere from about 500 to like 2000 somewhere in there depending on the size of the streamer and how good they are at getting people to convert a beta is a great way to do it i see betas can get you about a thousand to fifteen hundred if you promote it well basically for a month you say hey i'm running a beta i'm gonna run a beta everybody join you know either join my mailing list or come wish list there's a new steam feature called uh play come do that i find that if you promote it well and you tell the press you tell streamers or streamers that just cover betas if you tell them you've got an upcoming beta they'll send traffic and say hey this game has got a beta coming up just search for betas on on google they're sites that just specialize in promoting betas no interest adventure game to those and you can run multiple betas that's kind of what valheim did they ran betas and alphas all the time yeah i see but it kind of kind of makes a difference if you have a consumable game or one that kind of has more play time right yeah if you are doing a story based game it's tricky it's really hard to do that another good thing is reddit or imager those sites if you can write a good story post on there you can get anywhere from about 400 to about 1500 wish lists if you get a viral one of those like you post something and then it goes viral on reddit or imager you can get 400 to about 1500 wish list just from that so basically you're chaining these these moments together other thing that you're not asking about is the kind of like flat times this is what i why i teach people and why i created this class called how to make a steam page.com you can just go there and sign up if you have a good steam page you can increase your resting rate so basically like when you're not doing anything maybe you don't have a viral post you don't have a youtube coming out your your level is a little bit higher and that's just based off your how good your steam page is and how those tags that i told you about that's how they get recommended so let me show you there's another page on steam it's called um switch over to it it's uh straight on the dashboard it's called visibility now this just tells you how much traffic just straight up doesn't tell you about wish lists it just tells you like how many people hit your page how many people viewed it that sort of thing traffic breakdown oh oh yeah yeah so your most recent week you got 5000 impressions an impression is how many times people saw your capsule and then click-through rate is kind of a misnomer it's it's not a great statistic the one you want is visits so you have last week you had almost 2000 people hit your page now here's the thing the reason your click-through rate is so high see how it's 32 yeah it's not because you have such an awesome capsule although i like your capsule it's pretty good it's because you have youtube traffic and your youtube traffic goes straight to the page and so they don't see your capsule first they just go straight to your page because click-through rate is is just steam just saying visits over impressions it's just a simple math equation they did okay so that that's artificially high most people who don't have awesome youtube channels like you will not have hot that high of a click-through rate their click-through rate probably is in the range of five to ten percent yeah ten percent sounds like a like a like a good click-through rate actually that's probably pretty good right yeah if you've got a very very low click-through rate like if your click-through rate is like somewhere in the range of three percent to zero percent click-through rate that means you probably need a an improvement on your capsule your capsule should look more professional i typically find people who don't have professional capsules you don't want a screenshot of azure capsule because that looks cheap you want a really professional capsule so you basically also see where the traffic is coming from here right the one at the top is total and then the green one is external websites that's youtube interesting yeah here you can clearly see that whenever there's a spike from youtube direct navigation and search suggestions also spike up that's probably because some people just type it into into steam instead of um using the link right yeah exactly that's what people do are doing they are saying oh this looks good and rather than clicking your link that's maybe on your youtube they're just typing it in either to the search box or just googling for it and so both of those will be counted as direct traffic or search suggestions so that's what you're seeing there let's scroll down let me show you one thing that can improve a little bit so let's scroll down here um just stop right here okay so bot traffic other pages direct themes or it's okay see that one that's called discovery queue yeah it's 182. that's not that great let's see let me just do the math real quick on that one so let's say that's 90 days two you got two two people came to your page every day because of discovery traffic discovery queue that's not that great typically what i see is somewhere around the 10 to 15 per day if you've got that right and so this is what discoveryq is so your discovery queue is have you ever used that on steam i actually have not used that no okay discovery queue is actually how a lot of people find games on steam it's a very high traffic source for people who don't have youtube channels so what steam does is it finds games it gives you 10 games every day so it's kind of fun some people like to play it basically you go on steam and there's this button says discovery cue and you click it and just randomly pulls up 10 games that steam thinks that you're going to like and shows you those 10 games and if you like it you say yeah wishlist it or you say ignore and then you hit next and it just finds these 10 games a lot of people on steam use it not everybody but a lot of people use discovery cube your discovered queue numbers are actually pretty low when you average it over all the days and what that tells me is that steam does not know what type of game you have the whole thing of steam is they know what type of games you've played in the past that's how discover queue works steam knows you they know how many hours you played down to the minute of how many times you've played a game and so what discovery queue does is it looks at what you've played in the past and what kind of games are out there and it matches those up and if your tags aren't good steam doesn't know what type of game you have and if steam doesn't know what type of game you have it's never going to recommend your game in this queue but is it just but is it just the text or is it also like the the amount of people who hit wishlist once they see my game right that could also be a problem that steam is just like keep showing the game in discovery queue but nobody wish listed so i just stopped showing it right what'll happen is similar um what you'll see is when you fix your tags all of a sudden your discovery queue numbers will go up because that what steam does is it when you change your tags steam is going to be like okay let's pop this game in the discovery queue a few more times so it's going to put your game in more times and people will see it and if they hit ignore too many times steam says like uh stop showing that game people don't like that game discovery cube by itself will not make your game a hit or not but i use discovery queue and your performance in the discovery queue like how many times you're shown every day as an indicator of how confident steam is about your game type yeah that makes a lot of sense that is that's pretty smart what i see is when a game is hitting it right i see about 10 to 15 visits per discovery queue per day you're hitting it about one to two per day steam's kind of you're kind of inefficient on steam as far as what it knows to recommend your game for that's what i see when i look at the discovery queue okay now that we covered the basics it's time to move on to more games and we'll start with carlson first thing i see is of course this and i'm definitely getting portal vibes that's good don't think that i'm saying this is a portal clone or anything it is actually very beneficial on steam to look like other games because it steams recommending games to people there's the trailer i'm gonna stop this because most people when they're shopping on steam skip the trailer they just kind of click through it i can see you shoot i can see you leap and there's parkour good okay so already they're thinking okay kind of like you're weaving through stuff and jumping so then what they'll typically do is also kind of screenshots okay this looks very portable i see a gun here and explosions i see this bot a lot of people want to see gameplay and these both just by their nature with this zoom this looks like a cinematic which i would not recommend and the other thing is your first four screenshots are the most important ones and that's because and i'm going to show you a trick and i didn't show you this earlier there's this thing called the hover tool tip and when somebody sees a capsule and they're interested in the game they're going to put their mouse over it and then this thing pops up and it's called the hover tool tip it's your first four screenshots automatically pulled so your first four screenshots are super duper important and what i see is one bot two bot you've wasted two of your four spots with this little robot and i don't necessarily think that those are critical to explaining gameplay remember what i say is the most important thing is you have to tell people how you play the game and i don't think that these two bots are required yes they're maybe the goal or the villain but that's the story that's not how you play the game so i would suggest moving these first two these two bot images outside of the top four i think this this gun exploding with the sparks excellent this is a perfect screenshot that tells you gameplay the other thing is when i was looking through these i can't tell in a screenshot what's going on i know it's a grapple hook but from watching the trailer and stuff but again not necessarily gameplay this also is not really gameplay yes there's a bot standing there but it doesn't show action and what you do so you're kind of looking for these uh gameplay verbs of what the player is doing right exactly exactly and there's one thing that i wish was a screenshot that's not and let me show you exactly what it is i saw it in the trailer and i was like why is this not a screenshot but this one here it is right here when i saw the screenshot i can see the hot lava i can see the arrows i can see these two panels and i can see you bob in between them that like i understand the game when i see this i'm like okay i get it i would expect something like this to be a screenshot yeah i guess you don't really see that it's a parkour game in the other screenshots it's much as much and this one really explains that quite well that's true exactly you have to you have to like from what i saw from absorbing this game it's there's um parkour like like this part there's some shooting like rocket jumping it looks like with that shotgun you've got the grapple hook and then maybe you have some puzzle elements you know i see those are four key gameplay items what i recommend in my class uh on how to market your steam page and how to make a steam page is you pick out what your four key gameplay elements are and you just have to repeat them like all the time your first four screenshots are your four gameplay elements um i don't see that because after they look through the screenshots if they can't make sense of what the game is they're going to look here and so when you see that i don't see anything i see fps that's good you've got the genre right there fps parkour cool and slow-mo awesome in milk yeah you got to put the joke but you know i that's good the one thing that i don't see is it doesn't explain kind of the tools whoops you don't explain the kind of tools that you have available to you so for example i would mention in the short description use a grappling hook rocket jump i assume it's rocket jumping and then like run on the walls you have to be very explicit in the verbs think of the verbs and you gotta inject those verbs in the short description i would replace this milk and fuse it tell story and shoppers on steam aren't looking for story they're looking for what do i literally do in this game and rocket jumping grapple hook and parkour are really what they're they should have in there i know you mentioned parkour but what does that mean does that mean i can run on the walls or does it mean i'm doing jumping whatever it is you gotta explain it yeah okay that makes sense okay your tags i don't know they i mean you don't have the indie tag in there which is a thumbs up on that so all i'll look at is things that games are similar you know i mentioned that you have to be similar i see doom and gun fire reborn both of those are two different types of fps's and i don't think they're quite your fps i would expect portal to be in here but portal would be a puzzle game right that's quite different in terms of gameplay it could be and that's up to you i haven't played this game so i don't know the fact that doom's showing up that means steam knows it's an fps but it doesn't know what type of fps because there are very specific sub-genres in fps and this makes me think your tags could be a little bit uh more specific so this is perfect love the animated gif but here's the thing it's i see this as kind of a missed opportunity here this is awesome this is a great gif i see a rocket jump and i see that guy that's perfect but i'd expect another one to see for the grapple hook because that's a neat mechanic i saw one where you like had the grapple hook you swung in through a window that was so cool put that in an animated gif and put it there i would also show the parkour part because remember i said you have to keep repeating the same stuff over and over again i would show how parkour works like what are you doing what's the parkour aspect of it show an animation of that so basically take the most important parts out of the trailer again and show them here again because as we've learned the about section is pretty much your backup trailer for the people who missed it in the real trailer exactly it sounds repetitive but you got to be repetitive on your steam page good job on carlson i think it's i think it's a pretty good steam page next up we did hollow knight first of all because you requested it but also because it's kind of similar to will you snail as it's another platformer and i found it kind of interesting to compare the two one thing with hollow knight and this is one thing that i tell indies especially if your first time making a game don't compare yourself to the best indie games who hit big success and are more mature when you're a big success and you've been around for years and you're kind of like a new modern classic which hollow knight i consider a modern classic they're at a different level so you can't compare too much with what they do like some of the stuff i see is not ideal but it doesn't matter because they've they've made it they launched and they were successful so i always warn people not to look at the big guys too much because you're not playing the same game they are yeah but okay so first thing that i like though they put a little too many logos but look right here i can kind of see gameplay within four seconds that's a good thing now right here i can kind of see gameplay they're saying descend you can kind of see that this is metroidvania because like metroidvanias are always very vertical and they've got those like platforms that you like pop up the thing so already i'm getting metroidvania vibes and it's within i think six seconds perfect you should be doing this what they do here's one thing that i don't like but they get a pass because they've been around forever look at how many trailers they have one two three four five here's what people do they watch the trailer by skipping around they'll go like this they'll go okay okay i see that i see that i see that and they'll kind of play it so they can see some motion like okay i think i get it but let me look at screenshots they want screenshots like in the slot number two number three ugh so now what they got to do is they got to go click so many times to get to now it is i had to click like five extra times to get the screenshots one maybe two trailers on your steam page tops but this game's so popular and so big it's there now let's look at their top four screenshots remember top four are most important what do we have here i think this is a boss battle right or is this a not this is a boss battle i remember playing against this guy this is a boss battle so what we've got three boss battles in our first screenshot we already told them that there's boss battles so move some of these out of here this fourth one it shows it it's not just always on the ground there's some aerial combat stuff so that's good i do like how colorful these are each screenshot's a different color that's cool but the fact that you're saying the same thing three times with your first three screenshots not ideal you want to show the breadth of your game i would move one of these boss fights or two of these boss fights out this right here is awesome when i think metroidvanias i think of huge maps that you have to go through it sounds weird but a map screenshot for the right type of game is perfect because it tells people metroidvania they see this map like oh i bet this is a metroidvania right yeah so it's a little bit of a misconception that people maybe even want to hide their ui in the screenshots or something like that you probably shouldn't do that because ui and maps and stuff like that can be really good at explaining what your game is right exactly look ui can tell a lot just by things see how there's a circle with this filled in thing that means magic to me i play the game so i kind of know it's like your special abilities so just seeing that ui you're like oh i bet i have special abilities and there's like there's a long bar of these things to me that reads his health like oh hit points so you kind of know okay there's gonna be a lot of combat look at how big the health bar is that means i'm gonna get hit a lot very subtle things subconsciously without people realizing it is conveyed through ui so don't hold hide your ui and this thing this is a cool ui i like this one because look it shows your inventory i'm not sure what this is but i see a lot of spots this tells me this game is deep like people on steam like deep games they don't like silly arcade games that last like an hour and then you're tired of it they want deep games and when i see a really complex ui like this i'm saying i'm in for the long haul this is a big juicy game that's going to have hours of content just by looking that's what this ui tells me right yeah true yeah let's look at the short description so after they look at that they'll look at the short description and they skim it so forge your own path blah blah blah hollow knight epic action adventure i hate this term but they kind of earn it just because everybody says their game is an epic action adventure kingdom of insects who cares explore twist okay here's where it gets good explore twisting caverns that means metroidvania battle creatures good befriend bizarre bugs okay and 2d style you don't have to describe your art style because people see the art style in screenshots screenshots let screenshots be screenshots they're good at explaining mood art style so you don't have to explain it you don't have to say with unique visuals in your short description because they'll know it's unique visuals they look at your screenshots the things i like they explain verbs explore battle befriend those are cool verbs and so i'm already thinking okay metroidvania then look at the first tag this is cool metroidvania right there souls-like awesome platformer difficult you could almost use those 44 tags and explain the game you're like oh okay metroidvania souls like platformer difficult awesome i understand this game now they don't have the indie tag which is thumbs up on them so right there pretty cool steam page right here it's telling me what type of game this is so uh their long description they have cool art i would prefer to see not so much this art i'd prefer to see more of animated gifs of how you play the game but again this is such a popular game they get away with it so that's the basics of how their steam page looks i think it's it's a pretty it's especially for clat modern classic huge triple i indie games this is a good steam page next up i wanted to have a look at glitchion which is a game by one of my friends and his team i already covered the game on this channel before it's another metroidvania so it should be an interesting comparison to hollow knight okay so when i first come to a page as if i'm role playing as the way a person shops i'm gonna be like okay what type of game is this so i'm either gonna look at this trailer which we started midway but okay so i'm like what kind of game i'm scanning here i still don't see anything okay i saw my first platform jump right here five seconds not bad i like it under ten five i would cut a lot of that stuff but i think it's okay so i'm starting to see already okay it's a platformer i'm seeing some platformers some monsters chase me okay metroidvania maybe but i see mostly platformers so far and i see right here metroidvania platformer perfect that's really good you're very clear on your genre i think that's great here tech monopoly known as the forum has gone completely unchecked okay we've kind of discussed this a little bit short descriptions are not a place for lore um a lot of players don't care about lore at this point even if they're in the narrative games their number one question is what do i do in this game how do i control it so i would say skip a lot of this narrative next you say use glitchy abilities to exploit intentional bugs to your advantage as you begin to uncover true nature i think that's cool saying use glitchy abilities that's neat but to me i still don't get what the glitchy ability is is it just a visual effect what does it mean to glitch doesn't mean i get a go through a wall doesn't mean i get a fly what is a glitchy ability i don't know what that is i've never played this game i'm just a shopper what i'm thinking here is you need to explain this and so what i'm back in my mind is i'm going to be looking how do they explain what the glitchy ability is when i look through the screenshots here i see platform jumping i see a guy standing on some blue stuff i'm looking for what's going to explain what a glitchy ability is what makes this game unique this looks glitchy but what's going on here is this hot lava that i have to not step on or am i causing this so these are kind of the things that i'm thinking here like what is this glitchy ability i would be explicit here as say like use glitchy abilities such as the ability to go through walls or to rewind time whatever that glitchy ability is make it explicit like absolutely explicit so if you have multiple abilities you can just um name a couple of examples just to give people an idea of what a glitchy ability means in your game right exactly in and state the coolest one don't surprise them a lot of indies like to hold back on their coolest things don't more often than like more likely than not people are not going to play your game but if you tell them right up front the coolest part they're like oh all right always put your coolest boss your coolest ability right up front more often than not people are going to skip over your game rather than experience the coolness so don't worry about spoilers show the coolest stuff one thing and this is kind of aesthetic i don't this capsule um and i'm gonna be totally honest you got me there uh i'm here to give advice i i think this looks a little unprofessional um is the logo kind of looks like uh the the fire effect on photoshop which i used to do in the 90s when i used to first learn photoshop one of the best things you can invest in for marketing dollars is a good capsule because your capsules used all over i would hire a professional artist to do your logo like this and possibly even the art because i think your game looks good but your capsule art needs to support that i've seen uh with other indies and i explained this in my class i compare two indies and just the capsule art can have a big impact on your traffic and on your wish lists so dollar for dollar i think your capsule art is some of the best investment you can make so now i come to about this game and like we've discussed in the past it's kind of like a trailer just in text form with images and so the first thing i see is this image which is a cool image but it doesn't tell me about the gameplay what i would expect is maybe an animated gif of each glitch ability that you have or if there's a cool boss fight or something that's really unique about your game this is a great place to show that off um like this oh right there you did it like this i assume is a glitch ability and it looks like you're kind of phasing through i'm not entirely sure what's going on this is confusing i can't tell if your game is actually like splitting the screen into three and you're like i thought when i first saw this that this was moving me over into this third part of the screen this is confusing what i would do is take these three and make those three gifs stand on their own get rid of this one get rid of this one because this one i don't know what's going on here this looks like a cut scene and it's not showing action it's not showing what you're doing in the game these are perfect you did an excellent job with these three but they're so tiny and they they confused me because i thought this was a screenshot this was all three was one thing i would just do everything but these three like just these three would make you an excellent about this game section so do that i don't know what's going on here it looks like he's just jumping and bumping his head i i don't think this is a great gift because this this is like i mean it's kind of funny but it doesn't tell me about what's unique about your game like every platformer you bump your head on the roof right um the other thing that's kind of speaking to me is you got orion the blind force which i would expect ori to show you more like this hollow knight i would expect because it's a platformer so i feel like your tags are okay it's showing the right type of games i'm worried that i see jedi fallen and cyberpunk this also means that you don't have the right tags let's look at your tag structure here you've got enough tags you've got them all but i think the fact that you have atmospheric single player is messing up with your tags i would focus on which game you think is most similar maybe it's hollow knight maybe it's um orion the blind forest and match the tags of that so that your game is more closely paired i i do think this is positive the fact that says games that are similar hollow knight and celeste that seems like those games would be there but the more like this section has got me worried so maybe it's time to re-do your tags and it's okay you can test your tags try variation see if that improves things yeah that makes sense because if you have something like atmospheric single player in the in the top type text then obviously something like cyberpunk makes sense i guess yep i think it's confusing steam steam's like oh is this like cyberpunk or not steam can't read your images it can't steam doesn't look at this the only thing it knows to do to figure out your game is these be careful tags are powerful stuff powerful powerful stuff next up we're looking at slime keep finally not a platformer so this should be interesting i'm gonna try and figure out what kind of game it is that's what a player does they're like what kind of game what do i do okay players are thinking like okay i think this is like binding of isaac and maybe nuclear throne oh i don't see a trailer here oh where's the trailer this has gotten me where there's no trailer here and it doesn't have to be a super professional trailer even if it's early days i don't know what the development process is it doesn't have to be a well-produced trailer like derrick did in the previous stream it could just be video footage cut together like i said people skim through trailers so it doesn't have to be a super awesome trailer just put some gameplay on here and the reason is love it or not i make pixel art games pixel art games have a bad reputation on steam people think they're cheap they don't present well a lot of the gamers are younger so they don't have a nostalgic value for pixel art so they think pixel art is cheap video in showing your pixel art in motion when you've got like good animations good squash and stretch all that kind of stuff says okay this is quality like you have good particle effects pixel art does better in motion than it does static so you really need to overcome the fact that people are going to think it's kind of cheap not that it is cheap i'm just saying that's what people feel so when i see this i'm thinking why is there no video the other thing that i see is these screenshots all look very similar now i know you've got a green game it's kind of a aesthetic like game boy style game but they're all looking very similar screenshots to me remember how i said first four are very important the first four all look like you're wandering around you all have three hearts so i'm like do you only have three hearts the whole game what's going on there i've always got zero dots whatever that is players look at your screenshots to see depth if you remember when i showed you hollow knight there were a lot of colors in there like each background was different and to players that signals a different zone so just subconsciously it's feeling like this game doesn't have much depth because every single level looks the same now if there was one like it doesn't have to be different colors because you're using green as an aesthetic choice but i would expect like maybe a cactus or something you know like oh there's a cactus level there's a water level there's this you know i'd expect different environments so already that's kind of got me worried that i'm feeling like this is not a deep game um yeah i think what's the case in this game is that it it is very early in development still or this is a temporary steam page so this is just here to basically have the possibility to start collecting wish lists early on and i just wanted to ask you if you have any specific tips for a situation like that because as we found out earlier obviously collecting wish list is one of the most important things you need to do so setting up your steam page early makes sense but if you set up your steam page very very early then what is kind of the best way to go about that in your opinion if you don't have too much stuff to show yet yeah and i gotta give you credit for having a steam page up early i think a lot of indies wait too long to show it you really should get a steam page up as soon as you possibly can i would still do video in still images it's okay if you just do screenshots you don't have video but get up there as soon as you can and try and vary these up as much as possible as much as humanly possible i think it's good that you are showing gun that there's some wandering um just be careful about that and i understand like it's hard in the early days the next thing i see is kind of capsule i and i know this is early days if it is pixel art capsules are rough like i said indies have a bad reputation of pixel art games like cheap knockoff pixel art games and again i'm not saying that it is so we have to up overcome this and when you put pixel art in your capsule image which is this it reads as i don't have a budget if you notice like this dead cells is a perfect example it's a pixel art game a very beautiful one but they got an illustrator to make their cover same thing with like skull i think this is a pixar game a lot of pixel art games will still have a fully illustrated cover and that's just to show that like this is not my first game i know i can pay for an artist so i would recommend eventually if you get to that point to hire a fully illustrated capsule interesting so you're kind of collecting prestige points with that that's what you're trying to do yeah i kind of wonder if that's also the case if you have like five trailers at the beginning of your steam patch of that also is something that gives you prestige points it might but i i think if you have a fully animated one you're kind of walking the fine line of annoying players and showing off your prestige that's kind of why i say two trailers here's here's one way to do prestige one is also animated trailers you know i've seen they do like hand-drawn animation in their trailer but it doesn't show gameplay so what i say is first trailer is gameplay second trailer is your prestige one where you have like maybe a full cinematic opening and stuff you know all that kind of stuff that gives you the prestige that hey i'm spending money on this game it's worth it like if you look at dead cells dead cells is a good one they've got these animated trailers and you're like whoa they they put some money in this game it's not just some pixel art game that is like somebody's first game they put money in this game so that's where it's prestige so that's the fine line that you want walking there one thing and you know i'm gonna yell at you for this one you got that indie tag straight up front remember your tough top five tags super important so roguelike is good that's good 2d action procedural generation those are good but you got that in detail this is again wasted space that could be for a better tag your roguelike one is showing spelunky but i would expect to see down here if your tags were right a nuclear throne i would expect to see nuclear throne in here probably a game like it and the fact that i'm seeing dead cells in here dead cells is a side scroller that doesn't seem right that means tags aren't correct here it's it's matching to the wrong game so what i would recommend is look at the game that if it is nuclear thrown which i suspect or binding of isaac compare those two tags for those games and match your tags to those because you want your game to be listed down here like if i'm looking at let's say nuclear throne i would expect slimekeep to be down there so here's what i would also recommend really state just say 2022. just say it this looks like a math problem games always take longer than you think they are so it's 2022. just just be honest with yourself oh very true i mean i could go down there's no about this game but again if you're early phase you need to put some fun stuff in here put some fun stuff in about this game animation you want animations pixel art always looks better in animation than it does still and i know no slant on pixar again i make pixar games so next up dot romantic so here's a really try hard one from some indie deaf friends of mine oh yeah i like this one yeah try hard that just means good first thing when i come here i get the live broadcast i think it's annoying to have live broadcast but it actually does well this is one of those prestige points thing if you've got a stream going that means okay they've got their act together they're putting stuff out also thing that shows off prestige is these two side banners that just means you've got graphic designer on staff who can make stuff just having these subtle clues makes your game just a little bit higher so good work on that players do close these and into it it's it's not the greatest thing but you should still do these streams they do help especially if you're running in a festival like if you're featured in a festival or you're doing like um if you're dropping a major youtube that's gonna send traffic to your game have a stream running because they've got 331 uh viewers if you can get your traffic up to about a thousand people constantly streaming this there's a chance you'll end on the front page of steam just by having a stream going if you're in one of these big events or you're dropping a big stream or coming in have a video playing here and you can get some extra bonus visibility just by ending up on the front page of steam okay first thing it just feels like a beautiful game like it's hard to describe just a graphic design i feel expensive like it just feels like you never walk in a nice hotel and the carpet is soft super soft and padded and everything's just beautiful beautiful chandeliers and like i'm in an expensive place i just get this feeling from this page one thing i like to point out this is a pretty good capsule but the text is beautiful look at this a lot of indies first time in these they put what did we see in the last one flames on the text complex gradients it actually looks more professional if you're simpler look there's no gradient it's just a nice clean white text good font choice looks so professional versus putting all this like word art design on your text i think the capsule looks really really good yeah 100 agree the only thing and this is me because my eyes aren't great i did have a hard time kind of parsing what's going on here i think it's neat that you have these hex tiles but it doesn't quite re like if i squint my eyes it almost looks like a monster i know if i stare at this long enough that it's a windmill on a hex tile of wheat or something i kind of get that but i just can't parse it as well like usually i'm just having a little bit hard time it's i don't know what it is but i think it's actually the fact that it doesn't have a very clear silhouette so if you put something on a blank background like that the silhouette is very important in reading what it is and this this one if you just look at the silhouette you just can't reach what it is yeah maybe if you tilt it that's why i say maybe tilt it so the silhouette of the windmill is more extreme like i could see the fans of the sails and there were the other hexes again i'm not a graphic designer but i could see just to improve the silhouette it might make more sense than if it was just a hex tile of the windmill i think that would be really neat i love windmills who doesn't like a windmill right peaceful building strategy puzzle game perfect this is genre setting like this is what you want to do genre setting strategy puzzle procedure or peaceful like i know i'm not going to be building troops to like knock on each other it's peaceful i think that's great another verb create beautiful ever-changing village landscape by placing tiles again good verbs this is a perfect short description you're telling you're placing tiles building a village that kind of stuff explore a variety of colorful biomes discover and unlock new tiles and complete quests to fill the world with like perfect this is like the best short description i've read today when you're writing these think of all the things that happen when you click a mouse because these are the verbs that happen in the game like you know what is he doing you're placing tiles when you click you place a tile right you um you unlock new tiles you know like i saw in the video like if you go far enough you'll unlock a tile and there's little puzzles to do you want to be very very clear what you actually do in the game right tags for as good as everything is what do i see in there indie tag indie tag right in the middle it's not the first one so you get some points for that but i'm a little worried about that indie tag in there the other couple things is i don't know but does early access require you to put the tags up front i wouldn't put early access tag if you have the option you want to add tags that differentiate your game rather than make it generic an early access indie i even think casual kind of are very generic tags they don't distinguish your game like if i just if somebody said what type of game is this and you're like early access casual indie they're like yeah but what do i do in the game see those tags don't describe what you do in the game they're just like qualities of the game but isn't casual like one of the texts that could help steam to recommend similar games and compare the game to other stuff you've played it could and this one is a heart casual is a hard one because it used to mean casual game if you use the casual tag it used to mean like you're a solitaire game or you're a point-and-click all of a sudden a lot of indies have adopted casual to mean i don't kill people so tags are kind of like language where it drifts depending on who's using it casual has become associated with games that are pretty and you don't kill people and there's no blood that now has slowly turned into it casual's okay i'll give you a pass on casual but i think it's indies use this inappropriately originally it was supposed to be for like a mahjong game like we made a mahjong game that was casual but you know what's good guess what's in here similar to what i've played islanders yeah do you want to do do you want to do a quick islanders plug no just one interesting side fact that we're actually doing a cross promotion with them and um yeah we'll probably oh that's perfect yeah you asked you asked how do people promote their game that is how you promote it you get people who've made games similar to use you that are more popular or more advanced and you ask them to cross promote that is one of the most powerful things so indies figure out who's like you and cross promote and this game when i first saw this door romantic i thought this looks like islanders like it's beautiful it's city builder you know it's peaceful it's chill all those things you've done a great job of like of getting these to match thumbs up and you're cross-promoting like that right there is so good like oh my heart's a flutter just hearing that kind of promotional activity like that's what indies always ask like what do i do find a friend who makes a game similar to you and then cross promote your audiences that's how you do it okay cool um i didn't i'm not gonna watch the trailer but i really like the trailer it was chill it was explaining it it explains what you do in the game and i think action took place in like two seconds so all that is good the other thing that's really cool here i didn't really talk about these events you should steam likes have you heard the dreaded dead game if you don't update your game a lot especially in early access people think you have a dead game but they they are putting out events the last one was march 25th the previous one was march 12th excellent you want to make your page look alive like we are updating this we're doing things do these things so post events do as frequently as you can so that's door from antique i like it i wish listed it because i think it's cool if you're wondering like okay we've fixed our steam pages you've implemented some of these things how do you get visibility to your page i write about that every week on my newsletter and you can follow that on how to market a game dot com slash free every week i send out things that i've learned techniques that other indies have used how to like optimize other things outside of your steam page so you get more people to your page the youtube algorithm unfortunately doesn't really like videos with niche topics like this one so if you want to help me out and make sure that i can keep making these then please consider sharing this video with your game developer friends i'm sure they'll find it just as interesting as you did if you're still confused like you didn't get your page reviewed i didn't get to take a look at it you're still kind of curious what the theory behind all these things why i'm saying you should do this or that i give you the full context of how the steam page works i made a free class that you can take it's called how to make a steam page.com you sign up through there and then it's a free class it takes about an hour to get through and i just walked through every single element and how you know what best practice is what's good what's bad recommendations i look at other steam pages so you kind of get that full context so how to market a game.com free and how to make a steampage.com those are your two resources that i have i hope to be able to help you all that's probably the best other than that thank you so much jonas

Channel: Jonas Tyroller

Views: 60,713

Keywords: sell your game on steam, sell your own game on steam, how to sell your game on steam, game marketing, indie game marketing, get more wishlists on steam, how to tag your game on steam, make a store page for your game on steam, steamworks tutorial, steamworks, steam, game development, indie game development, game dev, indie dev, optimize your store page on steam, make a better store page, how to succeed on steam, tutorial, tips and tricks, how to, sell your game, sell more games

Id: ht6xx9en-ZU

Length: 61min 30sec (3690 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 29 2021