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.
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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.
We still have no word about the Steam Machine and Steam Frame, but a Steam Controller unboxing video has emerged that could point to Valve’s new gamepad launching soon.
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