In April Game Republic hosted an online meet up with Alden Kroll and Erik Petersen from Valve. Game Republic members were able to raise questions and hear insights about Steam. The event was part of Game Republic’s annual event programme for Game Republic members supported by our Official Partners Red Kite Games, Barclays Games and Creative and Xsolla.
Here are a few great answers to questions for developers looking to bring their games to Steam.
How do I get featured on the Steam front page?
Steam’s relationship with customers is one that’s built on customer trust and a long-term relationship with the customers. Marketing on Steam and visibility on Steam is all based off of customer interest, so we do not charge for visibility. We measure customer interest by looking at sales, because when a customer makes a purchase, that is the most concrete way that they can say they like that game. Another important thing is that most of the marketing on Steam is for games that are already released. Steam is built to feature and market games that are already out. This is because it’s an easy call-to -action for a customer when we say:  ‘you can buy this game and you can play it right now.’
Do Wishlists convert straight into sales?
The number of Wishlists that you have for your game doesn’t directly affect the amount of marketing and visibility that you get on Steam but there are a couple of places that you can get additional visibility, including the popular upcoming tab.
Wishlists are important because when you have a body of customers wishlisting a game, some percentage of those customers get an email sent to them saying that ‘the games that they said they were interested in is available’. They will also receive an email when the game is discounted at 20% or more.
So it is a great way to kind of communicate to customers about your game. If you just go find some shady business that’s going to buy you a bunch of Wishlists from bots, it is not going to cause any positive impact on Steam. But if you actually are reaching out and getting excited customers, then those are going to be the people that are actually likely to convert once you release the game or run it on discount in the future.
How do language tags affect visibility on Steam?
When a game doesn’t support the language that the user has selected in Steam, it’s going to be difficult. If a player doesn’t speak English, for example, if they only speak Korean and if the game doesn’t support Korean, it’s going to be difficult for them. It could depend on the type of game, but they may not have a good time with the game because it’s going to be hard for them to understand. So, we’re less likely to suggest that game to that customer because it’s not a game that they’re probably going to enjoy. So, when you add additional languages, you are creating an opportunity to be featured to more players.
Can you please explain tags and the importance of tagging on steam?
Tags serve two major roles within Steam: we use them to generate recommendations for similar kinds of games, the more specific tags will help better target the kind of game that customers want to see. So additional supportive tags are important for helping Steam narrow down to the set of users that are most likely interested in your game. Also, tags show your game at a glance. It gives customers a really quick idea of what the genre is, what kind of game it is and the style. So, when you’re applying tags to your store page, we recommend thinking about all the things that makes up your game: the genres, the sub-genres, the art styles, the point of view, the player count. Then when you get to the end of that process, there’ll be an ordered list of tags.
So, think about the broad strokes of your game down to smaller individual components. For example, the game Grand Theft Auto has the racing tag on it. It’s not a racing game, so, racing shouldn’t be the top tag because that would mislead customers about what the game is, but it can have racing as a tag because it does have racing mini-games in it.
Do you have any advice on game pricing?
It’s very much down to the individual game is the short answer. it’s important to understand on Steam, pricing is decided by the developer. They can set their own prices, not just for US dollars, but for all the currencies that they want to support. So, when deciding pricing of a game, there’s a lot of considerations that you want to make. It’s about the overall value of your game and how customers would perceive that pricing based off what you are offering them. Grand Theft Auto is going to have different thoughts around pricing than a small indie game that was made by one person and has two hours of content, for example.
You also want to think about if you want to also sell additional content down the road as that might impact your upfront pricing decision. Also, if it is a multiplayer or a single player game? If you’re going to have a multiplayer game, you probably want to make it more accessible to more players. I recommend doing research and looking at comparable games to what you’re making. What are they priced at? What is their business model?
Any thoughts on making a game free to download and try limiting content with a single in-app purchase to unlock the full game?
Some of our own games followed a similar model, I think that that’s a valid way to handle things. However, there may be a possibility where, if it’s a casual audience, they might give you negative reviews for not actually having the whole game free. So, if your hypothetical players are expecting a full game and then running into a pay gate to play the rest of the game, that means that you probably didn’t do a good enough job communicating that upfront as they were getting into the game. So, think about how your game is presented on the store page.
What advice do you have for making the process of launching a game as Steam Deck Verified as smooth as possible?
So, the Steam Deck is a handheld portable gaming PC. It runs SteamOS, which is a form of Linux. We created a system to help communicate to players what they can expect when they make a purchase, controlling expectations or setting expectations.
So, when moderators look over the many games in Steam, they prioritise the games based off customer interest. So, it may take some time after launch for your game to get verified.
But, if you’re interested in getting verified for your game, typically the things that we would recommend is:
– making your game a great experience on the controller;
– using good user interface sizing and scalability, text size and the ability to control it;
– and finally, if you use some type of anti-cheat, making sure that that’s compatible with SteamOS and Steam Deck.
The best practices for getting your game verified on Steam Deck also tend to just make your game better for everyone, regardless of what they’re playing on. So, we recommend running through these things regardless of whether you intend support Steam Deck.
Also, Steam Deck was largely designed so that you do not need to do any work for the game to run, we run it on Linux using the Windows build of your game so you may not need to do anything.
If the game has been visible for over a year, is it better to relaunch a new page?
If your game has changed a whole bunch since you originally put up that store page, then that may be true. So, if your art style has changed or if you’ve changed a lot of the scope of the game since people started Wishlisting your game, then you may be building a different game than what people had originally Wishlisted. But if that is not the case, we’ve seen games have store pages up for years before they release and they do just fine.
How difficult is it to balance a policy of no editorial interference while also ensuring sensible moderation practices?
We try to support everything on Steam that is allowable by local laws. So, some developers, especially ones that have content that may be sensitive in some countries, needs to be aware of that and they need to ask us to restrict distribution in countries where that may matter.
Also, Steam is built around individual preferences and personalize the Steam shopping experience so that a customer can indicate the things that they do not want to see and the things that I want to see more of. For example, if someone was more sensitive to the level of violence in games, they can go and set their settings to not show violent games and Steam as a store will filter those out of my shopping experience.
How much do developers benefit from the themed events like Steam Next Fest or the Summer Sale? How much exposure do they get from these events?
Yeah, so we host a variety of different events on Steam, and they have kind of different goals and different scopes. So, Steam Next Fest is built around unreleased upcoming games and being a festival of playable free demos. So that’s a great marketing tool for you as you’re preparing for release. After releasing the game, putting it on discount as part of the Summer Sale is useful as it is designed to shine a spotlight on different subsections of games and part of that is giving more visibility options to games, but also helping educate players about the huge variety of different kinds of games that exist.
Are there any resources that developers can go on to where there’s a breakdown of how to get a game on Steam?
Search on YouTube for Steamworks. That is our official channel, and we have a lot of tutorial videos in there. The other place is Steamworks documentation. There are getting started guides on there that will walk you through and explain filling out the digital paperwork, getting your app ID and going through the review process.
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