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Hi #gamedev #indiegames are you wondering if your Steam page traffic is normal? How much traffic should be converting? Is a 10% wishlist conversion rate good? I surveyed a bunch of games that appeared in the Steam Summer Festival 1 month ago and got some data ...
First. Details: Developers volunteered this data via a survey. In total, data for 56 games were submitted to me. There were 900 games in the festival. I reached out to developers who had very visible games. So take all that with a grain of salt when looking at "average" numbers.
Each blue bar in this chart is a game. The Y-axis is # of wishlists it earned over the week of the festival. A couple games ran away with it though. The Riftbreaker is #1 in this chart and earned over 41,096 wishlists that week. Not sure if it was #1 earner in the whole festival.
The Riftbreaker! Breaking hearts and breaking charts. The Riftbreaker! https://store.steampowered.com/app/780310/The_Riftbreaker/
Each bar in this chart represents a game and the number of impressions each one earned. Impressions are "capsule views". Those "cliffs" basically map to whether the game got a "featured spot" on the steam festival page.
The most "exposed" game was... The Riftbreaker again with 26,410,000 impressions. If you look at all the games I surveyed the median number of impressions was 1,566,578. 1.5 MILLION! Spend money on an artist who will make you a good capsule. Pay artists! Don't do it yourself!
If the shopper clicked a capsule they were taken to the game's store page. That counts as a "page view." Here is the chart of all the surveyed games and how many page views they got over the festival. Again, 2 big winners here. Ya one of them was The Riftbreaker.
The Riftbreaker!!!!!
If shoppers like your steam page and your game, they wishlist it. Because people gave me their wishlists I can figure out what the conversion rate was for every game. Here is what that chart looks like. Much more evenly distributed. And no! Riftbreaker was not #1. It was #17.
In fact, the games with the best wishlist conversion rates were not necessarily the biggest games or the prettiest (though some were). Here they are in order: https://store.steampowered.com/app/593640/Papetura/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1158190/Do_Not_Buy_This_Game/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/865610/Backbone/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/492540/She_Dreams_Elsewhere/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/925560/Bot_Gaiden/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1158190/Do_Not_Buy_This_Game/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/865610/Backbone/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/492540/She_Dreams_Elsewhere/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/925560/Bot_Gaiden/
Study the steam pages for these games! They are doing something right! Some of them are super pretty but I think they all do a good job of knowing their audience and speaking to them. Good copywriting folks! Good trailers! Good screenshots!
All of these top 5 games converted at least 20% of their page views into wishlists. The median conversion rate for all 56 games was 8.9%.
What genres got the most wishlists in the Steam Festival? Strategy games! Here is the median number of wishlists earned by games in each genre. Also, awe... platformers :(
Ending this on good vibes: 78% of developers who submitted a game to the festival said they thought it was worth the effort.
That is it. I wrote up more analysis here including some extra analysis of a couple games that did really well even though they were not The Riftbreaker. http://howtomarketagame.com/2020/07/20/was-the-steam-summer-festival-worth-it/
Also, what the hell Riftbreaker?
Oh and 1 more thing. If you were in the festival and you got more WLists than the Riftbreaker, send me your data. Even if you didn't beat it and want to make sure I am more accurate, send me your data. You can even opt to keep your game name private. https://forms.gle/TaLZpaJWGy5pJGfUA
