Thread by @RaveofRavendale, Thread about whether it's worth doing a demo for your Steam game [...]

Thread about whether it's worth doing a demo for your Steam game *pre-launch*:

Devs talk a lot about doing demos for your game after it has launched, but not so much about pre-launch demos. I decided to find out for myself whether it was worth doing one

GET READY FOR GRAPHS

On December 9, we uploaded a demo for Yes, Your Grace to its Steam store page ( https://store.steampowered.com/app/1115690/Yes_Your_Grace/).

We saw a *massive* spike in page views over the next few days -- around 6x as many page views as a regular day. Very promising stuff! BUT...

Our pageviews-to-wishlist ratio PLUMMETED. In the week before the demo, around 14% of visitors to the store page were wishlisting the game.

Once we set the demo live, that dropped to around 6%!

So we did see a spike in wishlists for a few days! But it was a small spike in comparison to the pageview spike. Basically, a large number of people were choosing to download the demo instead of wishlisting the game

Which is HMMMMMMMM

So at this point it became a question of: Was someone who downloaded the demo *more or less valuable* to us than someone who was wishlisting?

We did get 5,000 demo downloads over those initial few days, which is promising, buuuut...

In the wake of uploading the demo, our wishlist numbers started to drop, due in part to our lower pageview-to-wishlist ratio, which in turn meant the Steam algorithm started to see us less favourably

See here our wishlists prior to the demo, versus after the demo spike. TANKED.

It turns out that the HOLY STEAM ALGORITHM seems to care more about how many wishlists you're getting, rather than demo downloads.

So while we saw short-term gains in both pageviews and wishlists, long-term we saw a big drop in wishlists :(

Now, a tricky thing here is that there's every chance the wishlist drop was just natural, and had nothing to do with the demo. It could just be that the Steam algorithm had decided we'd had enough at this point.

It's kinda impossible to know either way, which is FRUSTRATING

But when we removed the demo a few weeks later, our pageview-to-wishlist ratio returned to around 14%, which meant slightly higher wishlists again (although nothing like what we were getting prior to putting the demo up)

So what did I learn?

Well, it's err... I mean... I don't know??

I learnt that demos heavily reduce the number of people who wishlist your game, which seems detrimental...

But then, maybe people who play the demo are more likely to buy it?

I didn't learn anything, did I

I guess a good question is "Would I do it again" -- and the answer is a definite "FUCK NO"

Something I might do in future is copy what EggNut did with @backbonegame and put a "Prologue" free separate product up on Steam, rather than a linked demo product: https://store.steampowered.com/app/992310/Backbone_Prologue/

Backbone: Prologue on Steam

Backbone: Prologue is the first act of a noir roleplaying detective adventure. You are raccoon private eye Howard Lotor, a second-class citizen of dystopian Vancouver, BC inhabited by animals....

https://store.steampowered.com/app/992310/Backbone_Prologue/

But otherwise, I don't know what takeaways there are here. If anyone else has experience with launching (specifically pre-launch) demos for games, let me know what your experience was!

Also please wishlist Yes, Your Grace, it launches on March 6, THANKS https://store.steampowered.com/app/1115690/Yes_Your_Grace/

Yes, Your Grace on Steam

These are troubling times, Your Grace. The petitioners’ petty matters exceed our limited resources, to say nothing of the war. A careful balance must be struck. Your throne awaits.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1115690/Yes_Your_Grace/

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