In 2015, 2965 games were released on Steam.

2016 saw an increase to 4207 games

The next increase was staggering! In 2017 alone 7,672 games were released on Steam

that's an average of 21 games per day on a 4x increase over the previous year!

So no matter what day you launch your game?

you'll be up against at least 20 other games on your launch day and over a hundred games during your launch week!

In this video we are going to tell you the steps you should follow to get the best chance of breaking through the noise

on an increasingly crowded PC platform.

We are Ask Gamedev, and this is How to get your video game discovered on Steam in 2018

So the first thing you need to know about Steam is that it's a platform predominantly driven by sale periods.

These sales often last many days and can include deep

Discounts on a large portion of the steam catalogue as a developer what you need to know is that the majority of Steam titles see

the bulk of their purchases occurring during these sales periods

so it pays to focus a lot of your promotional efforts on optimizing your steam store page traffic to coincide with these sales periods

Everyone knows the big sales like the steam summer sale and winter sales

There's also the autumn sale the Halloween sale and the lunar sale make sure you plan for each one more important than those sales

Though are the week-long deals

Why?

Well for one while everyone usually

Participates in the major sales only a limited number of Dev's can participate in a week-long deal in a given week

This is because you can only discount your game once every 60 days with the exception of major sales of course

So while you're up against almost everyone during a major sale you can expect to be only up against

250 to 500 other games during a week-long deal if you time your sales and discounts properly

Also, unlike major sales you decide the sale date in the week-long deals

so given the sales

opportunities and the importance of timing your discounts we recommend planning out your whole year to maximize the amount of times you can go on

sale this means predicting when you think major steam sales might occur and

planning your week-long deals so that there is no overlap between a major sale and a week-long deal

Doing a simple search can give you some indication of when steam has had major sales in the past

This is a good starting point for planning your go forward sale calendar

the next key point is to optimize your traffic during these valuable sales periods

During these discount events getting your product listed on the front page of steam or other key screen spots can result in huge traffic

Opportunities steam doesn't share details on how their algorithm works in regards to which titles receive prime placement

But it's fair to say that preference will be given to titles that one convert eyeballs into sales

And then to those sales into positive player reviews

So to prepare for these sales opportunities make sure your steam page shows your game in the best light possible

We recommend doing the following three things

First off go through all of your steam user reviews and forum posts

Make sure comments have been addressed in a way that reflects a high level of customer service

We found that recent negative reviews to your game can have a significant negative effect on how steam places your game within their promotional space

Responding to past reviews or comments shows that you're attentive to your community and it also

Humanizes your studio these comment responses shouldn't take a lot of time and just might convince future responders to avoid saying anything negative

The next thing we recommend is to post an update to your store page show that you're alive

Provide an update on the studio or development or cool things happening in the community around your game

Consider using the game description section the about this game section or the media carousel elements of your store page has places to communicate

What's new and exciting?

Potential buyers are more likely to purchase a game if they know that it's actively supported

Lastly think about releasing new features content or other game updates in advance of the sale so that visitors to your page will know that

Your title is continually being upgraded

Bonus points if a new content can be related to the theme of the sale

Steam often has seasonally themed sales so if you want to capitalize on say the Halloween sale a good idea would be to early some

Sort of Halloween themed content in your game shortly before the sale goes live a new feature may be that one thing that converts someone

from a wish list to a purchase an

Additional but not required strategy is to consider buying promotional ads on different platforms and sending traffic to your steam store page during the sale

There have been some anecdotal reports that steam will provide improved

Placement during sale periods to titles that bring a lot of external traffic to the steam platform

steam store page analytics are quite basic and currently in 2018

You don't have the ability to separate conversions by traffic source, but you may consider sending some additional traffic to your page regardless

Another good strategy. Whether it's in relation to a steam sale

Or just in general is to make sure that your game thumbnail image is optimized this image

Will show in steam promotional placements and search results it may seem like a small thing?

But it's hard for people to find out about your great game if they don't want to click on the thumbnail that will take them

To your store page best practices with thumbnails involved having a clear and legible image that grabs attention

Consider doing some searches on Steam and see what kind of thumbnails stick out and hold your interest

Look at options that stand out from other titles in your space

Unfortunately steam doesn't allow for very advanced A-B testing on their store page so your best bet to get hard A-B data on

Your thumbnail options may be to take out ads on other platforms like Facebook or Google and see what images are better at getting clicks

from a targeted gamer audience

You should be able to get a decent response sample with only spending a small amount of money and knowing what thumbnail resonates is

extremely valuable

next is curator connect if you don't know what Steam curators are check out the curator section on Steam the curators program is basically a

Way for people to make a list of their favorite games and have that selection live on Steam anyone can become a Steam curator

But the top curators are made of top influencers journalists and communities like totalbiscuit

Pc gamer, Jesse Cox, the PC Master a subreddit and rock paper shotgun

Getting your game on one of these curated lists can provide both short-term and long-term benefits in terms of visibility on Steam

So what is curator connect well back in the day there wasn't a way to contact curators directly?

You'd have to dig around find their contact info and pitch them with curator connect

You can send steam keys directly to curators through Steam

Our recommendation is to connect with curators that have a sizable audience and that curate games similar to yours

some curators even focus on a specific genre

Start with them first keep in mind that with curator connect

You can only connect with up to a maximum of 100 curators that number may sound like a lot

But it'll shrink fast use your opportunities wisely

Our next tool is visibility rounds when you have a significant content update

It's a good idea to run a visibility round even better when overlapping with a sale

When you launch a visibility round you'll appear in the recently updated

Section of the steam store and steam will also push additional impressions to players that have your game in their library or wishlist

This can be great for getting lapse players back into your game promoting DLC

You've just launched or converting people who have your game wish listed

Each game gets five visibility rounds so use each one

Wisely the best part is if your game sells well steam gives you additional visibility rounds to use

To use your rounds see the marketing and visibility section of Steamworks

Next let's talk about community coupons

One of the more overlooked tools at your disposal is community coupons

When a player collects a set of steam cards they can craft them into a game badge game badges earn the player items like emoticons

Backgrounds and coupons. coupons earned are for randomly selected titles, but exclude titles that the player already owns

This one is fairly simple to do as no additional art is needed all you have to do is opt in and select the frequency

and discount you can find the opt-in page in the game's dashboard under community, and then general and

Finally wish lists. We've mentioned wish lists when talking about some of the tools earlier

But now we want to talk about building your wish list numbers

Like we mentioned when you do things like go on sale or run a visibility round

Steam targets the people who have your game on their wish list

It's extremely important to build a large wish list when people say start marketing early

They should really be saying start building your wish list numbers early. Not only will this help you with launch

They'll give you a strong indicator of how much people like the game it will also help you with partner and/or publisher talks

imagine going into a negotiation and saying we're one year to launch and we already have 10,000 people that have wish listed our game and

So here are three things that you should be doing pre launch to build your wish list numbers

Number one create your steam page early when you announce make sure you have your steam page ready to go

You can't build a wish list without a steam listing

Number two make sure all of your own channels push people to your steam page with an ask to wish list your game

it should be a pinned post on Facebook and Twitter a regular section in your mailing list and

above the fold on your games website and

Finally make sure all of your pre-launch marketing efforts have a call to action of at our game to your steam wish list

If you're demoing at PAX, if you're launching your first teaser trailer, if you're doing an interview, if you're working with streamers and influencers

All of these initiatives should leave you to asking potential players to please wishlist your game on Steam

Thanks for watching make sure to subscribe if you want to see more game dev content

Do you have a game on Steam?

What tools do you use to help promote your game when you're looking for games to buy on Steam?

How do you usually sort through the thousands of games and find the ones you like let us know in the comments?

We'll be back next week with an all-new ask game dev video