If the Steam homepage has looked a little different to you lately, there might be a reason for that, and I'm not talking about the Steam summer sale.
Last month, Valve changed the requirements for a game to break into Steam's "Popular Upcoming" feed, which is coveted among indie developers as a way to gain visibility on the store and reach more players. Spending a few days or weeks in this feed can lead to big jumps in wishlists and eventually sales.
Multiple estimates indicated that where games would only need about 7,000 Steam wishlists to enter this feed previously, they now need about 100,000 as Valve prioritizes the biggest upcoming games. Several smaller developers despaired, bracing for a dip in Steam reach, but indie expert Chris Zukowski says another Steam feature has picked up the slack of Popular Upcoming and even benefited indies overall.
In a recent blog post, Zukowski highlights a Steam feature that impressed me last year and which I've used regularly ever since: Personal Calendars. Steam now shows you a customizable, chronological selection of recently released and upcoming games based on your interests and wishlists. (I recommend bookmarking the calendar page and limiting it to a 250-game view.)
This calendar, Zukowski finds, "is great and an incredibly positive boost for indie game devs and is a welcome addition." Multiple developers submitted data which shows a strong influx of wishlists driven by calendar presence.
"In the old days, Popular Upcoming would earn your game about 1000 wishlists per day. At best you could get 1 or 2 days on the list," he explains. "Now we are seeing 300-3000/day for the personalized calendar AND it can last for 2 months before launch AND a month after launch."
Game devs still need to build wishlists to tap into this kind of Steam visibility – Zukowksi estimates it's 8,000 to 30,000 for the calendar – but they may also reap greater rewards for pulling it off.
Because the personal calendar is more tightly curated and personalized, Steam users are more likely to click with, and indeed click on, the games it shows them, whereas the Popular Upcoming feed was more of a shotgun blast of disparate games. Two developers found that the clickthrough rate of personal calendar promotions, or how many people visited a game's page after seeing it promoted, was over 30 times higher compared to the Popular Upcoming feed.
"Indies always want 'exposure', or 'visibility.' But raw visibility to everyone on Steam is worthless," Zukowski reasons. "Gamers really have a preference about genres they like and those they don’t. You are not trying to convince someone to like your game. You don’t hard sell them. You don’t trick them into liking your game. Instead you are trying to find the people who are predisposed to liking your game and proving to them that your game matches their tastes."
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