The publication in the incentive with minimal cost

Correction of 07/07/2016
I too often refer to this text on the network, so I want to warn people: I do not bear any guarantee for the accuracy of the data told here six months ago. For good, I would like to delete this article, but I do not see such a button in the site interface. However, I found it necessary to remove some of the points with this fix.

This article is my personal experience of placing the game in Steam, and in it I will tell about those moments that bothered me in the process of this business. I hope it will help those who decide to go the same way. In this slightly special way, dear minimal effort.

I am an indie developer. I write games for my entertainment, in free evenings. And I did not want complexity. Well, you know, to understand the requirements of Steam, draw up documentation, invest in advertising and so on. I think this is close to many indie authors, especially if writing games is just a hobby. And now Steam, he seemed to me a very complex and costly scheme. And I decided to try to go out there, just ignoring all the troubles. Surprisingly, however, everything turned out. And now, in a question-answer format, briefly moments of my experience and a couple of tips.

Greenlight

Question: What kind of advertisements did you give for the passage of the Greenlight? And how many votes do you need?
Answer: I gave practically no advertising. Two of my friends made friends on YouTube a couple of videos on the game, that was enough. The number of votes will not give you any information, because the Steam editors decide to skip the game anyway. Sometimes they skip the game with five hundred votes, and sometimes they don't let in with five thousand.
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Question: What quality promotional materials are sufficient for Greenlight?
Answer: I cut a few screenshots, recorded a small piece of gameplay, and without editing, uploaded it to YouTube, a simple description of the game was translated by a Google translator, then corrected a little.

Q: What do you advise for the passage of Greenlight?
Answer: The player is interested in the gameplay, so give it to him immediately. Every second of the splash screen with the name, every second of the cutscene, every second of a smooth darkening of the screen is garbage for the player. He accidentally jumped and wants to understand what kind of game, so do not pull and show just the gameplay.

Question: What does not need to go to Steam?
Answer: I am not an expert, but I think that you should not go with games of the Bigfish level, a completely different audience. Games for smartphones also rarely get success.

After greenlight

Question: After the Greenlight, what information about me does Steam need?
Answer: You need your name, address, telephone number, TIN number, bank and your account number in it. As you can see, everything is elementary. TIN can be found at service.nalog.ru.

Question: How can double taxation be avoided so that the USA does not leave 30% of taxes?
Answer: Put a tick, give your Russian INN number, then agree with the w8-ben form. Everything is done in a couple of clicks online. You do not need to print anything, send it by mail or call the USA. I stop at this because I have heard such stories.

Question: How to minimum prepare a game build to pour it into Steam?
Answer: No need to cook. Even it is not necessary to recompile, Steam publishes games without questions without introducing games, cards and his other api.

Question: And what is the protection, dm? Steam itself introduces copy protection or how?
Answer: Steam himself does not implement anything, what kind of build you fill this and will be with the players. I did not insert anything from the dm-functions of the steampie, in other words, the folder with the game can be copied and run anywhere. Nothing bad happened, I think in the case of indie games you should not even think about the drm.

Sales

Question: How are sales in the first month?
Answer: In August I received about 1600 copies of the game sold.

Question: What is considered bad sales?
Answer: Bad sales, I think it is worth counting 100 or less copies in the first month. Such cases were sometimes described by the authors themselves in the Steam development groups.

Question: Does steamspy work and how accurate?
Answer: The steamspy.com service for small sales gives a huge scatter, so it is inaccurate, besides, it cannot separate the sold copies from the activation keys from the bundles.

Question: What is the percentage of returns?
Answer: The percentage of returns in my case was about 9%.

Question: What are pirates, did they affect the charts when the game hit the torrent?
Answer: The game was uploaded to torrents about a week after the release, in my opinion, this did not affect the charts in any way.

Question: How much is the transfer of money?
Answer: The first transfer went 6 business days, that is, counting seven days a week, from the moment of the report in the Steam affiliate program until the appearance of money in the Sberbank account.