How to cross promote under the new Steam Rules by Chris Zukowski
https://howtomarketagame.com/2024/08/26/how-to-cross-promote-under-the-new-steam-rules/
this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2024
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I might be missing something here but I don't really hangout on a game's steam page after I've made a purchase.
Is there a significant population of people who loiter on the page hoping to be marketed to?
@Kelly @gamedev Chris went through the numbers in this blog post and the one before and apparently, yeah.
https://howtomarketagame.com/2024/08/21/valve-just-took-away-a-valuable-visibility-tool/
According to one developer quoted in that post, about 75% of trackable wishlists of their sequel were achieved through crosspromotion from the first game's page.
In both Adam Coster quotes he is very careful to state that the stats he presents are relative to the trackable traffic. I wonder how the numbers for trackable vs untrackable breakdown.
So I got a bit curious and looked into this. The 75% figure is coming from the dev of a game called Crashlands who are releasing a sequel sometime this year. They do have a website, located at https://www.crashlands.net/ which... Doesn't make any mention of a sequel being announced. Likewise they have a game specific blog which also doesn't make any mention of it ( https://www.bscotch.net/blog/crashlands ). I think that's where they're missing out on marketing the most - their site should really show the trailer for the sequel.
To their credit though, they have made a "call to action" to wishlist post on Crashland's news page ( https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/391730 ) which I think is where most people learn about game updates and changes. Their Twitter also has a pinned link to the sequel (although it is not a tracked link, so they can't measure metrics through it).
And then there's also the elephant in the room; lost sales... People who were going to buy the game will see the sequel announcement on the page. They might decide to just skip the original game and wait a few months for the sequel and wishlist it so that they can be reminded.
To be fair to the dev the crashlands.net footer has an "our games" link to https://www.bscotch.net/games/
This page shows their full catalog including upcoming games. From there is a short link to their crashlands 2 page which encourages a wish listing on steam.
Personally as a consumer that's ideal, if I'm curious about their other games they have a centralized list, if I'm not interested then I can move on with my life.
For a steam centric take on this flow we can consider that every butterscotch shenanigans title has a developer link to this page https://store.steampowered.com/developer/bscotch , from there people can see the titles the developer chooses to feature and explore the rest of their catalog.
Every steam dev gets the same link, its a nice standardized way of exploring their work without spamming up their other product pages.
I think, an important part of why this could happen is that it will be voluntary, while noisy ads are not opt-in. They usually are not even opt-out :(