Oh wow, as a player these are all horrible options. I've bought the game, I want to play it without popup ads for your next game. Stuff like this might actually convince me to leave a negative review.

One thing I don't get though, and it doesn't work for unreleased games, but why not just create a bundle with all your games with a token discount like 10%?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

@savvywolf @gamedev That doesn't really serve the purpose these cross promotion methods were devised for. These are meant to help you gather wishlists for your upcoming games, which is supposed to ensure a successful launch by getting you into steam's promotional algorithms (e.g. Popular Upcoming) as quickly as possible.
I agree that most of these techniques are too intrusive from a player perspective, though. I'd add a link in the main menu and heavily discount old games at most 🤔

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago (3 children)

@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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

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.

[–] sukhmel 1 points 2 months ago

So maybe one day our ugly Steam pages will be looked back on nostalgically.

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 :(

[–] andioop 2 points 2 months ago

Me, pretty sure game dev is going to just be a hobby for me and that I will never try to sell a game, still enthusiastically reading the game marketing articles because they are interesting and it's cool to know the strategies being used to market to me so I can be better prepared…

[–] sukhmel 2 points 2 months ago

I think, the intended way is to publish "News" about new games in your previous games, that way user can see it in newsfeed. I used to ignore it but now I read it more because it really has some useful stuff now and then.

a real company that respects players like Nintendo

Uh, well, okay. Comparing pop-up you show each time with a poster one gets single time with a physical product is already quite strange. Comparing discoverability of that era with discoverability in Steam is even stranger than that