Chris Zukowski helps lots of game developers market their games. He goes over the most recent data and shows the best practices for marketing your game on Steam. It’s an interesting mix of understanding your market and how to manage the algorithms on various platforms to maximize your wishlist subscription rate.

1. The genre of your game is probably THE most important deciding factor if you’re going to do well financially. Passion side projects can be anything, but genre matters if you need to make money. Some genres are cash cows while others will likely be near dead ends.
2. Steam wishlists before ship are THE new success metric for your upcoming game. Your goal is to generate a tipping point of people who wishlist your game before shipping (TLDR: it is about 7000 wishlist subscribers). Once over that point, you will start showing up in the Steam popular upcoming games lists. Without that – good luck getting found.
   • Wishlists convert into purchases at launch at one of the highest levels of marketing (wishlists convert at 1-20% – most good internet marketing is a 2% conversion)
   • Getting potential buyers to add you to their Steam wishlist do not come fast nor easy. It takes dedication, consistent effort, and time. This is good because you can try lots of different things over that time. You’ll need to do lots of campaigns covering the game 1-2 years before ship to get to your goal count of wishlist adds.
3. Steam capsules (the little graphic that shows up in the store for your game)
   • You must remember: More people will see your steam capsule ad than will even buy it. It must draw them in and tell them everything. There are unwritten visual rules about how these are made for different genres (crafting games have to have a hammer, space games must have spaceship rear-ends, etc)
   • It must be highest quality thing you make – do whatever you can to hire a good artist if you spend no other money
   • How to make a Steam page
4. Promotions – 90% of your new Steam wishlist adds will come from online festivals and streamer coverage. Period. Here’s where you’ll find your highest ROI (in order):
   • Do online festivals! Do not do in-person festivals, they are a waste of time/effort/money. You’ll get many more exposures via an online festival than you could ever hope to get in even the most fantastic in-person weekend festival.
   • How do you find online events? https://howtomarketagame.com/discord – look for #EVENT-REMINDERS
   • Streamers – you must have a demo they can play immediately. The demo should be kept up basically forever so they can come back, others can try, etc.
     • Find streamers you want to target on SullyGnome or playboard.co. They break down streamer demographics so you can find ones that play your genre.
   • From this point and below, results will be an order of magnitude less:
   • Tik-tok has been somewhat good but has an uncertain future with possible bans coming.
   • Reddit – chancy but can work if you find your target audience.
   • Press – has decreased a good bit but does still work.
   • Twitter/Imgur/social media – pretty much does not work. Almost everyone gets lower than 100 Wishlist adds via this method – even at their best.