GamesIndustry.biz: How events being featured on Steam is changing games marketing

Ana

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The first time I saw this Steam feature was late in 2018, when a client of mine was included in Double Fine's Day of the Devs Steam feature. However, it wasn't until November of last year that I truly understood just how much of a game changer this really is.

Every developer knows that having a front-page placement on Steam is an awareness bonanza, which leads to a lot of additional Wishlists, or sales if your game is already out. We all know the classic front-page placements, like Featured and Recommended, Special Offers, Charts, and even the streams. But now there is a new feature, and it's tied to real-life physical events, such as the already mentioned Day of the Devs, but also EGX, PAX, and The Game Awards.

This is how it works: as you can see from the screen below, the last EGX Berlin event had a front-page banner that was present throughout the entire three-day event. If you or any of the hundreds of thousands of everyday Steam users clicked on it, you would be taken to a dedicated page. Once there, you will see every game that is present at the event and has a Steam store page set up -- you should have one set up as soon as possible anyway.

From here, you can click on any of the game banners and be taken directly to a store page. If your page is set up nicely, a whole new number of people will hear about your game, follow it, and hopefully buy it when it comes out.
Okay, but what about the numbers?

As every marketer knows, exposure is good, but actionable results are even better. So what marketing result can you get from this feature? Well, let me run some numbers by you. During the EGX Berlin event, my client received around 2,500 Steam Wishlists -- that's not bad, and throw in post-event press coverage and you get a pretty good "bang-for-your-buck" result. But it gets better.

Another client of mine was part of the last PAX East. In addition to the placement of their store page in the event's Steam feature, they went one step further. A few hours before the event started, they set up a looped stream on their Steam store page. Once the PAX East event feature was up on the front-page of Steam, it pumped them up to the No.1 most watched stream on the event page. And from there, the viewers kept on rising -- and so did the wishlists.

Together with the stream and the front-page feature, we got over 1,700 wishlists in the first 24 hours, and over 5,000 over the course of the event. That is a phenomenal result.
 

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