Promotion indie games on Steam Greenlight

Hello! Our team is now going through an important stage of becoming any game developer - the first launch of the game on Steam Greenlight. While I was preparing material for this article, our game entered the TOP-100 projects at Greenlight, scored almost 2,000 votes “FOR” and after 12 days received a green light.

In this article I want to share the information that I “dug” in the process of preparing for the Greenlight, and also try to analyze which promotion hypotheses worked and which paths turned out to be dead-end. We hope this information will be useful and someone will be in your favorites.




Our team of 5 people has been working on the game for a little more than a year, and we decided that the game is about 47% ready. Thanks to the AppCampus program, we released the game in early access to Windows Phone (where 1.5 episodes are ready). And while the work on the content to the remaining levels is in full swing, it was decided to simultaneously launch Steam Greenlight in order to advance through all the formalities from Valve, get the green light and start building relationships with our potential players on Steam.
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The moral preparation was the study of materials that describe the specifics of entering the site:

• A great tutorial on Tuts Plus - "Tips for Getting Greenlit on Steam Greenlight"
• Official recommendations from Valve - "Tips for Marketing on Steam Greenlight"

But the most interesting was the study of the stories of other developers who have already gone through Greenlight and shared their unique experiences, thoughts and concrete figures on their games. Thank you very much for that.

The articles were written within 2 years, and it is possible to follow from them how the requirements for projects changed and Greenlight itself was transformed.

Project	Getting the green light	Voices “For”	Ratio "For" / "Against"	Number of days	Original article
Legends of eisenwald	2013_05_17	47158	55% / 45%	154	Legends of Eisenwald. A brief history of greenlight.
After Reset RPG	2013_11_ ??	8726	83% / 17%	five	After Reset RPG. Kickstarter Reboot Preparations.
Metal war online	2014_01_08	18,000	??% / ??%	??	Getting the "green light" in the service GreenLight: tips and tricks
CATDAMMIT! Director's Cat	2014_02_05	11888	48% / 49%	54	CATDAMMIT! Director's Cat. We have been Greenlit! And here are our stats!
Guild of Dungeoneering	2014_05_14	8404	50% / 47%	36	Getting Your Game Greenlit In 2014
Warside	2015_05_14	6205	48% / 51%	43	Warside. Steam Greenlight: from bid to apruv.
Steam squad	2014_06_08	10,000	49% / 51%	106	Steam Squad. A few useful notes about Steam.
The masterplan	2014_06_24	7800	67% / 30%	9	The Masterplan. Sailing through Steam Greenlight in 9 days.
Train valley	2014_08_20	10790	59% / 41%	21	Train Valley has been Greenlit!
Sumoman	2014_12_30	4667	54% / 45%	89	Sumoman: the story of the withdrawal of the game on Steam Greenlight
35MM	2015_01_08	5133	84% / 16%	five	35 MM: How to make a game for Steam alone?
VHS Story	2015_01_29	3548	69% / 28%	five	VHS Story. How to get greenlit in 5 days.
TurnOn	2015_04_12	1954	49% / 45%	12

As you can see from these stories, over time, Greenlight requires fewer and fewer votes to get green light. This is due to the fact that the site itself has brought very little traffic and projects require additional efforts to attract votes.

Moreover, there is a huge problem with links to Steam:

1. Usually the link to the project is opened in the browser;
2. To log in to your Steam account from a browser, you almost always need to enter a verification code that is sent to the mail;
   
3. After entering the verification code, the person usually jumps to the main Steam page;
   
4. The search on the Steam homepage works only for released projects; for projects located in Greenlight, there is a separate section “Communities” -> “Greenlight” ;
   
5. The project can be found by searching or in the “New projects” section (now the situation is such that the project disappears from the first page in just 1.5 days, on day 9 our project was already on page 5).

Those. a person with all the desire to vote for the project will not be so easy, and how to deal with it for us is not yet clear ...


So, the most interesting part, which is described in almost all previous stories - the creation of the project page on Greenlight. What we did:

1. Created an account for our team;
2. Bought the opportunity to publish their project - this is a special position in the store called "Steam Greenlight Submission Fee" worth 3200 rubles. For colleagues from other countries, the price of a pass to Greenlight costs $ 100 (as in all Steam, price indexation did not happen due to currency fluctuations - which is good news);
3. Prepared a video on YouTube, screenshots, beautiful design and description of the project, etc.
4. Google Analytics was set up in the profile in order to see where people come to our page from;
   
5. We added the whole team to the Creators, registered all the links to our social media, just in case we created the Steam group on the game - although they didn’t understand how it would help us =)
6. Launched a page in free swimming.

After launch, the project will hang in the “new” category for a couple of days and will sometimes appear to users in the “Voting List”. But as practice shows (from the experience of other projects), it gives voices, but they are not enough, and illusions that Steam will bring the right amount of people to us to vote, and we, without putting any effort, will get the green light, we don’t It was.

Useful services

1. Service Bit.ly - allows you to create and personalize short links. The service shows the full analytics - from where and how many times this link was clicked. It is very useful to know when it is necessary to evaluate the effectiveness of a post;
2. The Sidekick service allows you to make an add-in to the browser and receive real-time notifications about whether the recipient opened the letter, what links he went through in the letter, what social activity the addressee, a kind of social spy, shows. When you send press releases to journalists it is very useful to know whether your letter was opened or not.

As Galenkin bequeathed in his book , the first thing you can do for free to promote the game is to lead your groups in different social services. networks. In our case, we develop our website, VK group, Facebook page, sometimes we write on Twitter, upload photos to Instagram, post videos on VIMEO and YouTube, even have a page on Google Plus, but I didn’t understand the interface ...

Their platforms are good, but by default there will be no one there except for your friends, and how to involve your community there is a topic for a separate article that we can write when we gain more experience.

The following for us were sites where you can create a page or a forum thread for your project, where you can publish information related to the game and its development. With due respect to these resources, new people will come to you from there, and if they like your project, they can cast their vote for you.

Title	Link	Special features
IndieDB	http://www.indiedb.com/	In my opinion, the most popular site for indie developers. Almost all projects here have their own page, and we are no exception. If your project has interesting news, then by publishing it in your game, after being checked by moderators, you can easily get to the main news page, which will give you free traffic. Moreover, if the project on the site leads various activities (publishes interesting news, uploads new screenshots, videos, etc.) and remains in the top 100, the site administration can start promoting it, as well as add it to the most popular collection of projects on Steam Greenlight .
Gamesjam	http://gamesjam.org/	A wonderful site on which various game-jams are held on a regular basis. Register your project there and even participate in one of them, what could be better?
Kanobu	http://kanobu.ru/	Kanobu has a pub where you can discuss various topics with players, including your game =)
Gamasutra	http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/	It is possible to write your own articles on various aspects of game development. If the content of the article is original and interesting enough, the article will be promoted by the editorial board, which will give you free traffic.
Unity Forum - Works In Progress	http://forum.unity3d.com/forums/works-in-progress.34/	If the game is on Unity and you have information and secrets you want to share with other Unity developers, you can create a page on the official forum and regularly update it with relevant information. It is important to read the rules of the Works In Progress section .
Game Blog	http://gamin.me/	A simple blog about games where you can write your article.
Gamedev.net	http://www.gamedev.net/	Pretty big game development forum. If you have relevant information for this site, then it’s not a sin to write an article or create a discussion.
Tigsource	http://www.tigsource.com/	Community of independent game developers and players. There is a forum and the ability to write articles about your game.
Video Game Blog	http://gamer.livejournal.com/	For fans of the good old LJ, one of the popular blogs about games. The audience is not so much, but it is responsive.
Community D3	https://games.d3.ru/	Nobody forbids to write an interesting post on your article in the thread related to game development.

We do not have the opportunity to post a demo version of our game, so these resources did not suit us - but they say that they help in the promotion of indie games:

Title	Link	Special features
Alfa Beta Gamer	http://www.alphabetagamer.com/	Catalog of indie games, it is possible to put a demo and test it on users.
Gamejolt	http://gamejolt.com/	Like Alfa Beta Gamer, you can upload a demo and get feedback on the project.
Itch.io	http://itch.io/	Another very good directory with demos and full games for sale.
Desura	http://www.desura.com/	It is possible to lay out an indie game for sale. Interface similar to IndieDB.

Large public games that publish your information in the form of advertising and for money:


We decided to test our hypotheses and buy several posts in such public places (with a total audience coverage of just over 1 million people) and got a result close to 0. For us, the effect was mainly given to small groups specializing in indie games, which we just wrote:


But the most effective was the publication in Gambling Public, and we just asked to tell about our project, and the record appeared in the public absolutely free, for which we are very grateful to the editorial board.

Facebook is perfectly monetizing itself and constantly offers to pay him for advertising, but we decided to go the way of a samurai and try to master the site without financial investments. Having learned a lesson from VK that the number of people in a group, as a rule, does not speak about the effectiveness of posts, we began to look at pages about indie games that can help us.



As it seemed to us, in FB, it is at times more difficult to type likes and subscribers of your page, so it is important to work with every active user. Like - add to friends. With that instantly (notifications fb to help). They asked a question - answer as quickly as possible, praised the game, art, thank you. All added friends - invite to put a like page. In your feed, regularly write about the development, diluted with personal posts. People will learn a lot from your tape and become interested in the studio itself.

We lead Twitter in English and try to use relevant hash tags if tweeting about game development. Popular hashtags related to game development:
#gamedev #indiedev #videogame #gamedesign # unity3d #screenshotsaturday #conceptart #gameart #screenshot #art #igdev #pixelart, etc.

Usually, these hash tags are looking for interesting information, as well as there are robots accounts that make automatic retweets, and because of this you have new subscribers.

We also recommend to see http://playfield.io/ - portal aggregator tweets associated with the development of games.


In conclusion, I want to add that there is also a game press that can help with the promotion of your game. They say that large publications make materials (previews, reviews, interviews, etc.) for free, but on the condition that you have tried and made a very cool, original game that you want to write about =)

We have not yet grown to this level, but have prepared for ourselves a list of those publications on which we want to see materials on our projects.



Useful links that helped us:

1. http://www.pixelprospector.com/ - Useful instructions for promoting indie (lists of forums, sites, etc.);
2. http://videogamejournaliser.com/ - List of sites writing about Indy;
   
   • More than 40 sites, specifically about indie - (google spreadsheet)
   • More than 170 sites about video games, both indie and AAA - (google spreadsheet)
   • More than 30 sites with video content, writing about games in different genres - (google spreadsheet)
3. http://videogamecaster.com/big-list-of-youtubers - directory of all flyspers;
4. http://youtubers.brightside-games.com/ is another directory of all the flyers.

PS In the article I did not have time to consider the portals that write about mobile games (iOS, Android, Windows Store) - maybe this will be the material for the next article. But while there is excellent material - Mobile PR: 160 sites where they can write about your game.

If you have links to resources that can potentially help in promoting the game and were not mentioned in this article - write in the comments, I will sometimes update this article. We will be glad if this article is useful to someone.