Steam Game Festival kicks into high gear

[The GameDiscoverCo game discovery newsletter, which you can subscribe to now, is written by ‘how people find your game’ expert Simon Carless, and is a regular look at how people discover and buy video games in the 2020s.]

Finishing out the week, here’s the final game discovery newsletter for your eyeballs. And only your eyeballs. (Fine, also the eyeballs of the other people also reading the GameDiscoverCo newsletter avidly.) Let’s hit it:

Steam Game Festival - Autumn’s changes?

OK, so with the Steam Game Festival - Autumn Edition now running (until October 13th), I thought it was worth peeking into changes for this edition and how it’s being received on ‘the Internet’ so far. (Actual game/wishlist results will come later.)

Reminder: the Steam Game Festival is a pre-release only, ‘you need to provide a playable demo’ showcase for your game. And as you can see above, there’s a special Game Fest ‘banner’ on Steam’s front page, so the Festival gets constant, good placement for the whole week.

(Also, you can now only be in one Steam Game Festival before your game’s release, starting with this one. So choose your favored Festival carefully - perhaps closer to release is better?)

Once again, there’s been some Valve editorial selection of games to be featured in special interview videos on the ‘official’ front page stream, which has 20k viewers right now. You can check them out via this Steam item - use the Autumn 2020 tab - and also via a high profile ‘Interviews & Commentary’ feature box on the Festival page.

Another interesting change is that there’s been an attempt to create a more dynamic chart of the top Festival games, with ‘Trending Now’ added (which is ‘games sorted by recent wishlist counts’, according to the mouseover.)

Unfortunately right now, the games adding the most recent wishlists are - by and large - also the most wishlisted and downloaded. (I think ‘Most Downloaded’, which is looking at all-time player count, and ‘Most Played’, current player count, are also new/tweaked for this sale?) But it’s good to see more dynamic options out there!

So, as a dev, you really want to get in the Featured section of the Festival (which is about 125 games, and randomizes!) These games are individually selected by Steam due to (I presume?) some kind of largely editorial method. Featured games also seem to show up strongly in the ‘Recommended For You’ box you get on the sale page when logged in.

There are also many, many hundreds of other games in the Festival, like the Summer Festival before it. It’s become popular very quickly, due to it being one of the few ways to get front-page Steam notice before a game’s release. I see some interesting experiments from individual devs, too, such as the Undying devs making an in-game game (!) in realtime on stream during the Festival.

So, yep! If you remember that wishlists received during demo events or features might convert at lower rates of more organic wishlists, I think it’s fair to say that all wishlists are good wishlists. Therefore Steam demo events are worth participating in if you make a demo with the right blend of ‘tease’ in it. They’re fun, positive events and the goodwill is strong around them.

(I was speculating with someone about whether Festivals could be creating ‘demo backlogs’ that stop people buying regular games. But I suspect that only a small subset of Steam players try out games in Festivals anyhow, so it’s probably not a big deal.)

Platform lessons from other creative industries?

Sometimes I enjoy looking away from the ‘video game industry’ to look at things like platform costs or publisher cuts for other adjacent creative industries.

Which is why I was pleased to see a Kickstarter update from author Cory Doctorow where he lists - very transparently - the current revenue splits he’s getting for his popular audiobooks. (The now- concluded Kickstarter campaign was an attempt to sidestep Amazon’s Audible, which mandates DRM on audiobooks on its platform.) Here we go:

So, guessing the first thing you’re going to say is - that’s pretty damn complicated! And I agree. And also: woo, 70-80% publisher cut on the DRM-free audiobooks if you’re not also selling it as a ‘retailer’. (Cory is acting as a ‘retailer’ by running the Kickstarter.)

Then I looked around and found this piece on audiobook platform cuts, where the author notes that distro company ACX (which is owned by Audible, gets you on iTunes and Amazon, etc) pushes an exclusive arrangement in exchange for “royalties of 40%, in contrast with 25% under a non-exclusive contract. But you are not permitted to distribute your Audiobook outside of Audible, Amazon and iTunes. And that rules out libraries, which are an important channel for small publishers.”

It gets more complex from there. But it turns out you have a bunch of platform choices for audiobooks as an audiobook publisher (or if you self-publish!), and that ecosystem also has issues around monopolies, DRM, and exclusivity. And in many cases, a 70% cut to the ‘creator’ looks relatively pleasant. Not surprising, but interesting.

Other stuff…

Finishing up here, here’s a number of other notable article and/or links that you might care about, if you’re in the business of making or selling video games:

Finally for this week, SteamDB owner Pavel Djundik pointed out the post-COVID ‘concurrent player’ graph for all Steam games, and how the lockdown made it look very different:

So basically, ‘[Steam gamers] want to party all the time’, then? Looks like it! Until next week…

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