Some developers forget about the importance of running a marketing campaign, and their games get lost against the backdrop of other releases.
Many games are released on Steam every day, and developers ask themselves the question: "how can a project achieve success?" One of Valve's designers has a simple piece of advice: make a good game.
A recent question-and-answer session was held for the traditional Steam Next Fest demo festival. Valve product and user interface designer Alden Kroll was asked about how to "attract more attention" to a game on Steam, and he explained that people can learn about games not only through the store itself:
Of course, people browse pages on Steam and find games that way. But people also learn about games all across the Internet. So it is useful to think about how you can find and engage players in different corners of the web — where they discuss or learn about games of your type.
According to Kroll, at Valve they "try very hard [to avoid] there being some kind of secret knowledge that you need to have in order to press a certain button and get more visibility [in the store]."
Instead, the designer explains, developers "need to create a good game and probably spread the word about it so that by launch day at Next Fest, someone already knows that the game exists."
The advice about advance promotion sounds logical: various games take part in Steam Next Fest, and a potentially good game may simply get lost among them. But if it has strong initial concurrent player numbers, that may attract newcomers.
