If you want your game to do better on Steam, Valve's got some bulletproof advice for you: make it good.
This is a half-joking, but not unreasonable summary of recent comments from Valve product and UI designer Alden Kroll, who joined business developer Ria Hu in a recent Q&A session focusing on Steam Next Fest, Steam's weeklong demo extravaganza.
Fielding a more general question about how to "get more attention" on Steam, Kroll notes that the topic is too broad for a concise answer, and seems to tip his hat to "marketing gurus" who have "talked at great length about different ways you can build audience and build awareness for your game." (One such guru is Chris Zukowski, who recently talked at great length about why Valve needs devs to use their "magical power to turn straw into gold".)
He echoes some of those ways himself. "Certainly, people explore Steam and discover games that way," Kroll says. "But also, people learn about games all over the internet So it's useful to think about how you can reach and engage players in places around the internet where they might be discussing or learning about the kind of games that you make."
Kroll notes that the folks at Valve "try very hard" to avoid "some secret thing you have to know to click this certain button to get more visibility." Instead, he reckons, "you should make a good game and probably get word out so that the day you launch in Next Fest is not the first time anybody has ever heard about your game."
Steam Next Fest, once the rankings and algorithms kick in after two days, is pretty good about surfacing promising, relevant demos and games. It's helpful, Kroll says, but if it's the start of a game's journey, "you've probably missed a bunch of opportunities to get people excited about your game and start telling the world about your game."
This is pretty dev-facing stuff, but it's interesting to me not just because it's fairly rare communication straight from Valve employees, but also because it's clear acknowledgement of how games are discovered online and how that broader ecosystem intersects with Steam's own discoverability tools. Many developers have told me that Steam is handily the best storefront for visibility, but it's not a silver bullet, as evidenced by the many games that go nowhere on Steam despite its huge install base and strong tools. Often, the simplest explanation is that games have got to be good to get anywhere, though quality is not a guarantee of success.
"Where around the internet can you engage with fans and start building awareness and excitement?" Kroll concludes. "Use your trailers, use new screenshots, use all those excuses to make people care about your game and pay attention, and get excited about the release of your demo and your game."
Kroll and Hu also point to an older video from Valve's Erik Peterson, who offered a more under-the-hood view of how Steam games are recommended to players. It's another interesting watch if you're wondering why your Steam feed looks the way it does.
