A few weeks ago we posted an article about how releasing both a demo and a prologue for our game Rise of Humanity affected our main game wishlists ( - feel free to check it out here). In this one, we would like to share the effects of the Steam Summer Sale and Users Reviews, we hope you find it useful!
Impressions
First of all, let’s have a look at the impressions of the prologue capsule. If you are unaware what impressions are, they are the times that Steam displays a clickable capsule (image of your game) on its platform. You can find this data on the Steamworks backend under ‘Marketing & Visibility’. We used it before to test different capsules and see which ones had a higher clickthrough rate but that is maybe a subject for another article.
The chart below shows the impressions since the release of the free Prologue on 24 June with the start of the Steam Summer sale.
As you can see, it starts off at around 20K impressions on the launch date. And it stays the same until the 5th of July, when suddenly…
What happened, you might ask?
Well, at that point we got our tenth user review. And since the reviews were positive, the game suddenly made it to the ‘New and Trending’ section of Steam in the free-to-play category. Impressions went up to 50k a day.
The next jump we see is on the 8th of July. This is when the Summer Sale ended. The explanation is the following: normally, the free-to-play category (in which our game belongs) is easily accessible from the left-hand menu of the Steam front page. However, during the Summer Sale, this was replaced and hidden (to make room for the games featured in the sale, we assume). With the Sale ending, the free-to-play category became visible again, along with our prologue. As a result, impressions went up to over half a million.
After the rise will come the fall, we dropped back to around 200K impressions on July 13th, the reason for this is dropping from first page of the new and trending to the second page. Personally, we thought this would have a larger effect, but this still seems fine for now.
Wishlists
Here comes the interesting part, let’s have a look at the impact on our main game wishlists.
As you can see, it does not follow the same lines as the impressions, but we can look for similar trends.
We see a strong start at release of the prologue version but then also a steep drop. We have a new peak that reaches its top on July 5th, the date that we got the tenth user review. Although it does not line up with the horizontal line on the graph, hovering over the next peak says July 8th, again, the end of the Steam Summer Sale. Numbers go up and down a bit over the weekend with a decline on Monday the 12th and it goes up again a bit on the 13th, when we are moved to the second page of the ‘New and Trending’. So that might be a case of Monday blues?
On average, we see 50 new wishlists a day since the release of the Prologue. Before we were on about 5 to 10. It is hard to say anything on the quality of the wishlists but all of this did have a nice side effect as well. Our main game is now listed in ‘Popular Upcoming’.
Our conclusion
- Having at least 10 positive user reviews is important for further visibility on Steam.
- Releasing during a Steam Summer Sale remains a bad idea – even if your game is free.
- Looking and trying to analyze this data is actually a lot of fun, but takes away development time 😊
Thanks for reading & check back for more in the coming weeks! 😊
