Mobile Steam Survival Guide for Mobile Developers
Friends, harsh developers on Steam will probably find this article naive and superficial, but believe me: there are many developers in Russia who are so focused on mobile markets that they have no idea how this resource works. If this is your situation and you are now suddenly felt the desire to make money in the new market, then this material will be useful to you. Enjoy reading!
Imagine you are a mobile game developer. Perhaps you have already achieved significant success in mobile markets, but at some point you have a feeling that something is missing. A certain itch arose in my head, which prompts to reach a new level. Your games bring an excellent income, but the soul is still restless: I want something more, something bigger and more powerful. Under the influence of this feeling, you begin to look at how things are with the big brothers in the desktop market. Thoughts come involuntarily: maybe it is worth making a statement on Steam?
Our answer: maybe worth it! First of all, think: do you have a project that can be successfully ported to the desktop without any problems? It's not just about the interface and management, but also about the sales model, because most of the games on Steam are paid, and your most popular projects are most likely free-to-play. If nothing of the kind comes to mind, we advise you to seriously consider whether you need it. Development from scratch is a big waste and risk.
')
If the project is found, or your itch still does not allay anyway, then let's look at what awaits you on the chosen path. To begin, consider Steam as an unfamiliar and very aggressive environment in which you will not be happy.
Immediately, we note that in addition to Steam there are many other distribution systems, which are described here in this wonderful translation from PatientZero . If you are targeting this platform, then let's be honest, you are a bit late. According to SteamSpy, 38% of all Steam games were released in 2016. This is a huge increase in the number of products. Now Steam is not as hospitable as five years ago. He is much less actively attracted by the audience to your game, and it can be lost in the stream of garbage, which every year becomes more and more. Many market players go to GOG and other services. But despite this, Steam is still a great platform with a million people, just times are more complicated now than, for example, in 2010.
According to SteamSpy.com, 38% of all games were released in 2016
Here is what we have at the moment (for September 18, data from SteamSpy):
The total profit of games on Steam in 2015-2017. 2/3 of the total income brings paid games, but free-to-play is gaining momentum. Most likely, half of the red graphics are games from Valve.
Thus, it is impossible to say that Steam is already a departing train, but hurry does not hurt.
If you are not at all familiar with Steam Direct and its history, we recommend reading the article translation of " Steam Greenlight and Steam Direct: What indie developers need to know ." When you switch to Direct, you no longer have to bother with the audience at the pre-release stage. This is both good and bad. From the good: it will provide you with an easier way to enter the market, without the help of Greenlight. From the bad: the audience will need to be recruited from scratch, perhaps through social networks, since no one will know about it at the moment your game is released on Steam inside the system.
All you need to publish is $ 100, a series of documents and your project.
Your access to Steam can be divided into three stages, four steps each. Consider the process in more detail.
check in
At the very beginning, you need to create your own Steam account, then go to the SteamWorks page, where you need to fill out information about your company, enter all the necessary information and pay $ 100 for Product Submission Fee. There are a lot of nuances here (for example, you need to submit all the information correctly to avoid double taxation), about which we will probably write a separate article.
Publication. Jobs on Steamworks
What is Steamworks? SteamWorks is an interface that provides users with tools for developing and publishing. It provides a number of features, such as: integration with the Steam client, integration with the community, adding and editing achievements for games and much more. The name Steamworks refers to the entire project management system, including the control panel and the Steam API. We recommend to read about technical aspects of integration in interesting articles from Comrade Dinisoid . In this article we will focus only on the "admin".
When you get access to the control panel (called Game Admin on Steamworks), be prepared for the fact that you need a lot of pictures. We are talking not only about standard screenshots and hats that mobile markets are asking for, but also fundamentally new visual content: achievements, playing cards, etc.
All this is necessary, as it is in the additional functionality of Steam (achievements, cards, etc.) that there is a huge potential for attracting and keeping your players in the game. Below we will talk about this in more detail. By the way, there is an excellent official channel of Steamworks Development , which contains training videos for any of the stages of publishing your project.
Game support
Of course, supporting the game and working with the audience is a topic worthy of a separate article. The main thing you want to pay attention to here - do not forget about the community! Steam is a great battery of like-minded people that forms strong social chains. The service itself chooses which games to recommend, depending on how actively the community interacts with it. Therefore, use all methods. In addition to standard pages in social networks, be sure to use the Community Center , which in fact is Facebook for Steam users. All discussions are held in the Center, screenshots are posted there, reviews are written there. More details on the capabilities of this tool will be discussed later. And of course, do not forget to update the game more often. Even small fixes remind players that you have not forgotten about them and support your project.
As we have said, Steam offers a very powerful mechanism for promoting products. Yes, there are a lot of games now and it’s not easy to break through (especially for a novice developer), but nevertheless, Steam helps you a lot.
The best feature of Steam is personalized recommendations. Most of the Steam paying audience are socially active players. They have a lot of friends, well-trained profiles, they constantly buy new games and write reviews. For such users, Steam has a personal recommendation engine and a customizable start page. Let's take a closer look at what this gives us.
Features of the start page
The “ Popular and Recommended ” list of 12 games, which consists of recommendations for a specific player .
When forming it, the following are taken into account:
Block "Special Offers"
In this block is placed:
The block of personal recommendations from a socially active audience
These include:
Curators' recommendations
A relatively new system of recommendations, which is currently being actively developed. The curators of Steam are individuals or organizations that help others find interesting games in the Steam directory using the advisory service. Steam tracks your actions on the platform and selects those curators who recommend titles that match your interests.
The block "Recent updates"
Everything is simple and similar to the Apple AppStore and Google Play. It is necessary to update the game more often, so that it appears regularly in current lists.
The conclusion of the game "in the light"
When someone plays your game, all his friends see it. Information can reach them in different forms, whether it be screenshots, messages about achievements or a review of the game. If the user has a lot of friends, then your game can go on a turn of popularity due to the word of mouth effect. For example, this was the case with the ZUP series of games.
As we have said, Steam is a very unique platform with interesting mechanisms at the level of developer-player. Now we look at the brightest elements that you definitely need to use.
The first is early access for products that are still under development. Many people criticize this possibility: for a huge number of projects, the story ends with the fact that the developers do not fulfill the promise and the game never leaves the early access stage. But for an honest developer and an audience that wants to support him, this is really a worthwhile mechanism. If you really want the community to take part in the process of creating your game, then you should use it. A good example of working with an audience in early access is Amplitude Studio and their games in the Endless Space series. The company allowed the community to participate in the development of the game with the help of the Games2Gether service - people got the ability to influence exactly which features will be introduced into the game. Thus, during the early access period, the community is accumulating, which will later support the game.
Go ahead. How can a player find your game? Even if you do not have a large advertising budget, there is still a chance that the audience will see your title thanks to a system of personal recommendations for the player.
The list of recommendations is always on the main page, in addition, during sales, Steam encourages those who look through these lists to the end.
To work with the audience, use the already mentioned Community Center . Keep your blog there, answer questions and user reviews, lay out patch-laptops. The community loves when the developer takes into account the views of users. Such work can create you a reputation that will help you sell the development in the future, or to ensure the success of additional content for this game.
Use the tag system . Unlike mobile markets, there are no categories on Steam, and users can add tags. That is, to those genres that you choose when publishing, tags from users will be added later. The latter will also influence who the system will recommend the game to. Thanks to this, your product gets an opportunity to find its audience, even if it belongs to a very experimental genre.
Here we would like to give some tips on how to better position yourself for a mobile developer who decided to move to the Steam market.
According to our observations, on Steam, the audience doesn’t like various ports - from mobile platforms, Facebook, etc. Back in the days of the Greeenlight, this was perceived as cluttering up the market. Accordingly, games should not look like a port from mobile devices. If you are a mobile developer, then let the players know that you are not engaged in a hack.
A good example of the approach to the port of the mobile game
A couple more points:
Now you need to say a few words about the design page of your project.
The top of the page is the most common, here is the logo of your game, screenshots and a brief description. It is important to note that promo screenshots, screenshots and various artworks cannot be used on Steam. Only real footage from the game.
The middle of the page contains a more detailed description, a link to the achievements of the game, as well as all additional information. An interesting feature: in contrast to the mobile market, on Steam, you can insert into the image description and format the text in different ways.
Difference of feedback system from Apple AppStore and Google Play
In the Mobile Store you can simply put 5 stars and leave. Steam has a more complex system of rules for those who want to leave a review, and the calculation of the total estimate is not limited to the calculation of the arithmetic average.
So the rules are:
Total interest rating of games on Steam (data of own calculations)
The Steam community is a very turbulent environment that can be a great storm. New reviews are often written under the influence of read old ones, creating a cumulative effect; in other cases, the negative or positive may come as an avalanche, as a reaction to some event. So try not to annoy the audience and immediately release good products. Mistakes you, most likely, not forgive.
Recently, the review system was rather revised, and now the free promotional keys of the game are not taken into account when calculating. In other words, to distribute the game to get good reviews, will not work.
On the other hand, as the statistics show, in order to make a frankly bad game, you still have to try. So you have every chance to get into the green zone.
How to choose the price on Steam? Of course, if you have a staff of marketers, they will answer this question. Well, if there are no such brave guys, then here are some tips.
The most important thing - consider the region where you sell the game. Not for nothing, Steam has introduced a flexible regional pricing system. The most obvious example is Russian players who are used to indexed prices in rubles. Another example is the CIS countries, where often this index is not taken into account, although it seems to be as it should be.
To track the price difference even created a special service Steamprices , however, Valve is actively struggling with buying products "not in their own" regions, for which you can even grab a ban. So think in advance about pricing and indexing.
An example of price indexation. Pay attention to the percentage of growth relative to the Russian ruble.
Naturally, you need to adequately evaluate your product. You should not underestimate your merits and the resource spent, but it’s also pointless to put a price tag on an indie game like an AAA product. As soon as the price starts to seem too high, the community gives a sharp reaction in the form of negative reviews, which can greatly affect the future of the game on Steam.
If you look at the list of the most expensive games , you can see that they collect few positive ratings.
However, if you look at the list of the cheapest games, we will not find anything good there either: most projects are rubbish.
There have already been several cases in which players "dropped" the assessment of the game after a sudden price increase. Recently, Paradox Interactive was hit in this way, which increased prices by 10-30%. The players were very indignant with such changes and changed the rating of games for the worse. It got even new and good projects, such as Tyranny.
Consequences of price wars
Of course, we do not support such pressure on the publisher, and we believe that the work of developers should be adequately evaluated. And yet, consider these factors, determined by the prices on Steam.
For those who do not have this information, there is an excellent article-translation from PatientZero " On pricing for indie games ", which describes in more detail the problems of building pricing policies on Steam, as well as the psychological aspects of pricing.
You seem to have a good game, but for some reason the score still creeps down. See reviews in Russian - everyone is happy, look in English - everyone is happy. We advise you to look at the Chinese localization, you probably forgot about it.
If you publish your game all over the world, remember about translations, so as not to get a guaranteed minus from a deprived audience.
A well-known picture that shows the danger of sales.
So, you laid out the game, began to create a community, and then suddenly ... a sale! Everyone is running, screaming, the main Steam page is changing dramatically, and you understand that you need to do something. But what?
Steam sale is a whole cult with its own rules, rituals, rites and crowds of sectarians. Each sale is closely monitored by the community and attracts millions of players who spend huge amounts of money.
Major sales are confined to certain holidays, such as the New Year or Halloween. The most ambitious - summer and Christmas. In addition, there are various themed promotions, discounts from publishers and many more different events.
Do not forget about sales and get ready for them in advance. Always plan your pricing policy and take into account the prices of competitors. There is nothing better to attract players than to make a festive event or to participate in global Steam events!
For those who did not scroll to the end of the article - thanks for reading to the end! Here we tried to cover most of the aspects of working with Steam. Of course, in each item you can go deeper to infinity, but even with such a base, it will be easier for you to navigate the elements of this system.
If you have questions, write them in the comments. If there are large-scale questions, write them in Google, since most aspects have already been analyzed on the shelves in articles and video tutorials.
On our own, we would like to thank services such as SteamSpy , SteamPrices for being there and doing their job well. In addition, many thanks to the authors of articles and translations on the topic of Steam, to which we referred in the article.
If this material seemed to you too long, then here are all the necessary links for detailed self-study:
Steamworks - SteamWorks home page with which you can start publishing your game.
Steamworks Doc - a huge portal with documentation on the integration of Steam services into your game
Steamworks Development - the official channel on YouTube, which posted many video tutorials and examples of work in SteamWorks
Steamworks.NET - framework for integrating the Steamworks API into Unity
Steamworks Unreal - Steamworks API integration material in Unreal Engine 4
Thanks for attention! We continue to play and develop games!
Itching head
Imagine you are a mobile game developer. Perhaps you have already achieved significant success in mobile markets, but at some point you have a feeling that something is missing. A certain itch arose in my head, which prompts to reach a new level. Your games bring an excellent income, but the soul is still restless: I want something more, something bigger and more powerful. Under the influence of this feeling, you begin to look at how things are with the big brothers in the desktop market. Thoughts come involuntarily: maybe it is worth making a statement on Steam?
Our answer: maybe worth it! First of all, think: do you have a project that can be successfully ported to the desktop without any problems? It's not just about the interface and management, but also about the sales model, because most of the games on Steam are paid, and your most popular projects are most likely free-to-play. If nothing of the kind comes to mind, we advise you to seriously consider whether you need it. Development from scratch is a big waste and risk.
')
If the project is found, or your itch still does not allay anyway, then let's look at what awaits you on the chosen path. To begin, consider Steam as an unfamiliar and very aggressive environment in which you will not be happy.
Everything is new. Something about Steam
Immediately, we note that in addition to Steam there are many other distribution systems, which are described here in this wonderful translation from PatientZero . If you are targeting this platform, then let's be honest, you are a bit late. According to SteamSpy, 38% of all Steam games were released in 2016. This is a huge increase in the number of products. Now Steam is not as hospitable as five years ago. He is much less actively attracted by the audience to your game, and it can be lost in the stream of garbage, which every year becomes more and more. Many market players go to GOG and other services. But despite this, Steam is still a great platform with a million people, just times are more complicated now than, for example, in 2010.
According to SteamSpy.com, 38% of all games were released in 2016
Here is what we have at the moment (for September 18, data from SteamSpy):
- There are a total of 17,000 games in the database (for comparison, there are more than 1.5 million of them on Google Play or Apple AppStore)
- 47 million active users in two weeks
The total profit of games on Steam in 2015-2017. 2/3 of the total income brings paid games, but free-to-play is gaining momentum. Most likely, half of the red graphics are games from Valve.
Thus, it is impossible to say that Steam is already a departing train, but hurry does not hurt.
What you need to know about Steam Direct?
If you are not at all familiar with Steam Direct and its history, we recommend reading the article translation of " Steam Greenlight and Steam Direct: What indie developers need to know ." When you switch to Direct, you no longer have to bother with the audience at the pre-release stage. This is both good and bad. From the good: it will provide you with an easier way to enter the market, without the help of Greenlight. From the bad: the audience will need to be recruited from scratch, perhaps through social networks, since no one will know about it at the moment your game is released on Steam inside the system.
All you need to publish is $ 100, a series of documents and your project.
How to start your way?
Your access to Steam can be divided into three stages, four steps each. Consider the process in more detail.
check in
At the very beginning, you need to create your own Steam account, then go to the SteamWorks page, where you need to fill out information about your company, enter all the necessary information and pay $ 100 for Product Submission Fee. There are a lot of nuances here (for example, you need to submit all the information correctly to avoid double taxation), about which we will probably write a separate article.
Publication. Jobs on Steamworks
What is Steamworks? SteamWorks is an interface that provides users with tools for developing and publishing. It provides a number of features, such as: integration with the Steam client, integration with the community, adding and editing achievements for games and much more. The name Steamworks refers to the entire project management system, including the control panel and the Steam API. We recommend to read about technical aspects of integration in interesting articles from Comrade Dinisoid . In this article we will focus only on the "admin".
When you get access to the control panel (called Game Admin on Steamworks), be prepared for the fact that you need a lot of pictures. We are talking not only about standard screenshots and hats that mobile markets are asking for, but also fundamentally new visual content: achievements, playing cards, etc.
All this is necessary, as it is in the additional functionality of Steam (achievements, cards, etc.) that there is a huge potential for attracting and keeping your players in the game. Below we will talk about this in more detail. By the way, there is an excellent official channel of Steamworks Development , which contains training videos for any of the stages of publishing your project.
Game support
Of course, supporting the game and working with the audience is a topic worthy of a separate article. The main thing you want to pay attention to here - do not forget about the community! Steam is a great battery of like-minded people that forms strong social chains. The service itself chooses which games to recommend, depending on how actively the community interacts with it. Therefore, use all methods. In addition to standard pages in social networks, be sure to use the Community Center , which in fact is Facebook for Steam users. All discussions are held in the Center, screenshots are posted there, reviews are written there. More details on the capabilities of this tool will be discussed later. And of course, do not forget to update the game more often. Even small fixes remind players that you have not forgotten about them and support your project.
What does Steam do for you? Promotion mechanisms
As we have said, Steam offers a very powerful mechanism for promoting products. Yes, there are a lot of games now and it’s not easy to break through (especially for a novice developer), but nevertheless, Steam helps you a lot.
The best feature of Steam is personalized recommendations. Most of the Steam paying audience are socially active players. They have a lot of friends, well-trained profiles, they constantly buy new games and write reviews. For such users, Steam has a personal recommendation engine and a customizable start page. Let's take a closer look at what this gives us.
Features of the start page
The “ Popular and Recommended ” list of 12 games, which consists of recommendations for a specific player .
When forming it, the following are taken into account:
- recommendations curators, which is signed by the player
- friends recommendations
- global sales
- games with growing popularity
Block "Special Offers"
In this block is placed:
- Promotions on the weekend (sales, free weekend)
- Offer of the day
- Other discount offers
The block of personal recommendations from a socially active audience
These include:
- Recommendations from friends
- Link to a large list of recommendations, which is based on the user's gaming experience
Curators' recommendations
A relatively new system of recommendations, which is currently being actively developed. The curators of Steam are individuals or organizations that help others find interesting games in the Steam directory using the advisory service. Steam tracks your actions on the platform and selects those curators who recommend titles that match your interests.
The block "Recent updates"
Everything is simple and similar to the Apple AppStore and Google Play. It is necessary to update the game more often, so that it appears regularly in current lists.
The conclusion of the game "in the light"
When someone plays your game, all his friends see it. Information can reach them in different forms, whether it be screenshots, messages about achievements or a review of the game. If the user has a lot of friends, then your game can go on a turn of popularity due to the word of mouth effect. For example, this was the case with the ZUP series of games.
Features of the work and support of the game on Steam
As we have said, Steam is a very unique platform with interesting mechanisms at the level of developer-player. Now we look at the brightest elements that you definitely need to use.
The first is early access for products that are still under development. Many people criticize this possibility: for a huge number of projects, the story ends with the fact that the developers do not fulfill the promise and the game never leaves the early access stage. But for an honest developer and an audience that wants to support him, this is really a worthwhile mechanism. If you really want the community to take part in the process of creating your game, then you should use it. A good example of working with an audience in early access is Amplitude Studio and their games in the Endless Space series. The company allowed the community to participate in the development of the game with the help of the Games2Gether service - people got the ability to influence exactly which features will be introduced into the game. Thus, during the early access period, the community is accumulating, which will later support the game.
Go ahead. How can a player find your game? Even if you do not have a large advertising budget, there is still a chance that the audience will see your title thanks to a system of personal recommendations for the player.
The list of recommendations is always on the main page, in addition, during sales, Steam encourages those who look through these lists to the end.
To work with the audience, use the already mentioned Community Center . Keep your blog there, answer questions and user reviews, lay out patch-laptops. The community loves when the developer takes into account the views of users. Such work can create you a reputation that will help you sell the development in the future, or to ensure the success of additional content for this game.
Use the tag system . Unlike mobile markets, there are no categories on Steam, and users can add tags. That is, to those genres that you choose when publishing, tags from users will be added later. The latter will also influence who the system will recommend the game to. Thanks to this, your product gets an opportunity to find its audience, even if it belongs to a very experimental genre.
Recommendations for creating a developer account
Here we would like to give some tips on how to better position yourself for a mobile developer who decided to move to the Steam market.
According to our observations, on Steam, the audience doesn’t like various ports - from mobile platforms, Facebook, etc. Back in the days of the Greeenlight, this was perceived as cluttering up the market. Accordingly, games should not look like a port from mobile devices. If you are a mobile developer, then let the players know that you are not engaged in a hack.
A good example of the approach to the port of the mobile game
A couple more points:
- If you are not a major publisher, then it is desirable to have not too many games on your account - 5-10 is enough. A large number of products in the absence of a big name on Steam make people suspect that your titles are not of high quality.
- Any game, even a small one, should have its own project site. This may be a normal landing page with links, but it should be.
Recommendations for the design of the game page
Now you need to say a few words about the design page of your project.
The top of the page is the most common, here is the logo of your game, screenshots and a brief description. It is important to note that promo screenshots, screenshots and various artworks cannot be used on Steam. Only real footage from the game.
The middle of the page contains a more detailed description, a link to the achievements of the game, as well as all additional information. An interesting feature: in contrast to the mobile market, on Steam, you can insert into the image description and format the text in different ways.
Extremely aggressive environment. Steam Rating System
Difference of feedback system from Apple AppStore and Google Play
In the Mobile Store you can simply put 5 stars and leave. Steam has a more complex system of rules for those who want to leave a review, and the calculation of the total estimate is not limited to the calculation of the arithmetic average.
So the rules are:
- The review must contain text
- You need to play at least 5 minutes in the game to be able to write a review.
- The system does not provide stars and intermediate ratings. You either recommend the game or not
- The final score is determined by very specific calculations (see table)
Total interest rating of games on Steam (data of own calculations)
The Steam community is a very turbulent environment that can be a great storm. New reviews are often written under the influence of read old ones, creating a cumulative effect; in other cases, the negative or positive may come as an avalanche, as a reaction to some event. So try not to annoy the audience and immediately release good products. Mistakes you, most likely, not forgive.
Recently, the review system was rather revised, and now the free promotional keys of the game are not taken into account when calculating. In other words, to distribute the game to get good reviews, will not work.
On the other hand, as the statistics show, in order to make a frankly bad game, you still have to try. So you have every chance to get into the green zone.
Pricing on Steam or do not be greedy (but do not be too cheap!)
How to choose the price on Steam? Of course, if you have a staff of marketers, they will answer this question. Well, if there are no such brave guys, then here are some tips.
The most important thing - consider the region where you sell the game. Not for nothing, Steam has introduced a flexible regional pricing system. The most obvious example is Russian players who are used to indexed prices in rubles. Another example is the CIS countries, where often this index is not taken into account, although it seems to be as it should be.
To track the price difference even created a special service Steamprices , however, Valve is actively struggling with buying products "not in their own" regions, for which you can even grab a ban. So think in advance about pricing and indexing.
An example of price indexation. Pay attention to the percentage of growth relative to the Russian ruble.
Naturally, you need to adequately evaluate your product. You should not underestimate your merits and the resource spent, but it’s also pointless to put a price tag on an indie game like an AAA product. As soon as the price starts to seem too high, the community gives a sharp reaction in the form of negative reviews, which can greatly affect the future of the game on Steam.
If you look at the list of the most expensive games , you can see that they collect few positive ratings.
However, if you look at the list of the cheapest games, we will not find anything good there either: most projects are rubbish.
There have already been several cases in which players "dropped" the assessment of the game after a sudden price increase. Recently, Paradox Interactive was hit in this way, which increased prices by 10-30%. The players were very indignant with such changes and changed the rating of games for the worse. It got even new and good projects, such as Tyranny.
Consequences of price wars
Of course, we do not support such pressure on the publisher, and we believe that the work of developers should be adequately evaluated. And yet, consider these factors, determined by the prices on Steam.
For those who do not have this information, there is an excellent article-translation from PatientZero " On pricing for indie games ", which describes in more detail the problems of building pricing policies on Steam, as well as the psychological aspects of pricing.
Briefly about localizations
You seem to have a good game, but for some reason the score still creeps down. See reviews in Russian - everyone is happy, look in English - everyone is happy. We advise you to look at the Chinese localization, you probably forgot about it.
If you publish your game all over the world, remember about translations, so as not to get a guaranteed minus from a deprived audience.
The terrible is coming ... sales
A well-known picture that shows the danger of sales.
So, you laid out the game, began to create a community, and then suddenly ... a sale! Everyone is running, screaming, the main Steam page is changing dramatically, and you understand that you need to do something. But what?
Steam sale is a whole cult with its own rules, rituals, rites and crowds of sectarians. Each sale is closely monitored by the community and attracts millions of players who spend huge amounts of money.
Major sales are confined to certain holidays, such as the New Year or Halloween. The most ambitious - summer and Christmas. In addition, there are various themed promotions, discounts from publishers and many more different events.
Do not forget about sales and get ready for them in advance. Always plan your pricing policy and take into account the prices of competitors. There is nothing better to attract players than to make a festive event or to participate in global Steam events!
Conclusion and links to information
For those who did not scroll to the end of the article - thanks for reading to the end! Here we tried to cover most of the aspects of working with Steam. Of course, in each item you can go deeper to infinity, but even with such a base, it will be easier for you to navigate the elements of this system.
If you have questions, write them in the comments. If there are large-scale questions, write them in Google, since most aspects have already been analyzed on the shelves in articles and video tutorials.
On our own, we would like to thank services such as SteamSpy , SteamPrices for being there and doing their job well. In addition, many thanks to the authors of articles and translations on the topic of Steam, to which we referred in the article.
If this material seemed to you too long, then here are all the necessary links for detailed self-study:
Steamworks - SteamWorks home page with which you can start publishing your game.
Steamworks Doc - a huge portal with documentation on the integration of Steam services into your game
Steamworks Development - the official channel on YouTube, which posted many video tutorials and examples of work in SteamWorks
Steamworks.NET - framework for integrating the Steamworks API into Unity
Steamworks Unreal - Steamworks API integration material in Unreal Engine 4
Thanks for attention! We continue to play and develop games!
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/338314/
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