What nobody tells you about releasing a game on Steam... transcript

So, I was making a mistake recently of browsing at the r/gamedev subreddit and I came across this post, "Our debut indie game just launched and we're being completely flooded with curator and Twitch requests for keys. What's the actual standard practice here?" And I couldn't do anything else but kind of like sigh. These are posts that I see basically every week over on the r/gamedev subreddit and people come and ask me this as well.

And it's kind of the problem of there's a lot of videos of like, "How do I make a game?" and there's not that many videos of like, "Okay, I've made a game. Now what the hell happens?" And I want to talk to you about that in this video. So, if you're in like the top 15% of Bite Me viewers who is close to release or has released the game already, this is the video for you definitely. So, let's just dive into it with this one.

It's It's a tale old as time. I've made so many videos about it. I've engaged with these curators before. The answer is always you do not interact with them. You just delete the emails. I'm serious. You just delete the emails. I have genuinely set up an email rule for like our company that anytime an email comes in that references the word curator, it goes straight to the bin. Because there are two approaches here. Either ask for keys or they ask for the curator connecting.

And in both cases you lose. Most of the time they will ask for Steam keys and you know, this just ends up on G2A. I've done that. I've given like some Steam keys to the these curators. I've tracked them and then I I just saw that same key on G2A, bought it, oh it's the same key and then you can get a refund. But that's where these go. These are This is how people get keys to put on G2A for example. They abuse the system.

The second thing that you could do is okay, I'm going to send them curator connect and they cannot get a game key to sell. That's right. We've also done that because we're like, "Hey, they don't have a key. What are they going to do? Sell it?" They're going to upload your game to piracy forums. That That's what it comes down to because curator connect entitlements cannot be revoked. So, once you give someone a build, you know, I've I've gone into like depth into like older videos about this basically, they can eternally keep updating the pirated version if you push updates without them having ever even needed to buy your game to begin with.

So, just do Do engage with Steam curators. That's the the first big thing I want to say. Now, you've released a game, but it's good. I think there's one thing that I want you to do the moment your your game is released basically. It's something that you can only do once the game is out already. And it is scheduling discounts. I'm just going to show you mine, I guess, because this is clearer to see. Discounts are after your first few weeks of your game's launch are going to be the main way you will be driving traffic.

So, let's say like 3 months after your game's release, you will be selling more in the one week that your game is on discount than if the game isn't on discount for like the rest of the 5-week cool down period basically. That's just the way it is basically because people who don't buy the game on launch, but they do have that wish list, they're kind of just waiting until a better moment in time for them to buy them, which is often on a sale.

It could either be something like the Steam Summer Sale or Steam Autumn Sale. Or as you can see here, we also have this concept of week-long deals. So, this is where you can just go on discounts for a week because of no specific reason. And what you do is you go into this um like it's under apps and packages and then discount management. You go into this dashboard. You won't have as many games most likely. And then you check this box, show all week-long discounts, and then you just fill in every single time you can go on discount basically.

So, you see if I scroll down further. Okay, we can see here we can do some deals here. There it automatically shows you if you're joining a discount like too early. Like for example, we can't join this one in October because our horror games are participating in Scream Fest. It shows you that. But any single time that you can go on discount, like for example here in December of this year, you already kind of want to schedule your discounts.

And what's important here, like I'm just filling in some values for example, so like preview and save, okay. This is done. And you can do this for the entire year in advance and you just on autopilot start making money basically by having these discounts scheduled. What is important to note if you do discounts is two things. One, apart from your launch discount, always discount at at least 20%. Steam will send email notifications to people who have wish listed your game when a game goes on discount only if that discount is equal or over 20% or if it's the initial launch.

So, whenever you launch your game, wish listers will get an email even if that the game is at 0% discount or it is at 40% discount, they will get an email. But any subsequent discounts like week-long deals or the summer sale or anything like that, only if you discount over 20% or 20% or over, then you will once again get those email notifications. If you discount at 15%, your sale will have almost no impact because most people just will not know that your game is on discount, for example.

Those email notifications matter a lot in notifying people that, "Hey, the game that you were interested in is actually on sale now." So, always go for 20% or higher. The second thing, and this is one that also I have to sometimes warn developers about, is your discounting pace, your discounting rate, basically. So, if I just go back here, you can already see kind of, okay, M198, first discount 20%, 20%, then we drop to 25%, 25%, and like I haven't scheduled further.

But basically, do not go into panic mode and be like, "Oh, my game didn't convert well enough on launch. I'm immediately going to do 30% discount, 40% discount, 50% discount for the summer sale or whatever." Even though your game has only been out for a few months at that point. My general pace that I would suggest to you is to go 20% first for like two discounts and then go 25% for two discounts and then you can go 30%, 35%, 40%.

Kind of you very slowly trickle. It's a waiting game. For some people, yeah, they will only buy the game if it's on 50% discount. But there is no reason for you to immediately go on 50% discount when there's a lot of people who would also buy the game on 20% discount. You're kind of just losing money that way. Just be patient. A higher discount percentage is also not going to save things like your Steam reviews and things like that.

If your game gets like bad reviewed for like, "Oh, the game is too high priced." Yes, you can deep discount a little bit deeper, but don't suddenly go like, "Okay, first discount 75%." I think for the most part, you don't really need to go over 50% for your Steam discounts, unless you're like years into the future basically. I think otherwise, it doesn't really matter that much to go that deeply because our games that are stuck at 40% like for example, Unicycle Pizza Time, we almost always discount at 40%.

It's also the deepest discount we've ever had. Still always converts every time. Like it converts to a rate that I'm pretty happy with based on like the amount of outstanding wish list we have. Even though it's not like incrementing the discount that much anymore. Same thing with like Overtime Anomaly, sometimes we do a little bit more crazy for the summer sale. Play around with it a bit, but always do discounts. Now, one little meta thing that I don't have like personal evidence of, but it is something that all the developers I know have been having good results with is you can also schedule your own discounts with this create discounting for 2 weeks instead of 1 week.

And developers are noting that this is better. It's a bit harder because you don't have like the nice overview where it automatically tells you when you can go on discount, but you can schedule 2-week long discounts and generally you earn more because the cool down period is always 6 weeks after you go on discount anyway, whether you do a 1-week or a 2-week discount, so you may as well discount for 2 weeks. And it gives basically the same amount of visibility, but you sell more.

So, that's something you want if you can try out. I personally haven't done it yet, but I just wanted to mention it for the sake of completion. And then we get to something that I have personally quite some experience with and that is reviews. As you see here, we're at 69% nice reviews for M198. The first important thing to know is that getting 10 reviews should be your number one goal the moment or even like before kind of you release your game.

You need to get 10 reviews quick. Why? There's a graph of our Steam Discovery Queue from one of our earlier games. The game released on July 20th and then you can see here discovery queue is this green line July 20th how there's a spike because our game got picked up in discovery queue and it died very quickly again. And then here you can see a second spike a much larger spike. If I pull up our wish list graph as well you can see this kind of correlates as well of like release and then 10 reviews is a larger spike.

I guess I already spoiled it. What happened? We got 10 reviews on this day. We had a pretty bad launch where we couldn't get 10 reviews right when our game came out and that punishes you really hard in the Steam algorithm because until you have 10 reviews you almost don't really exist for the Steam algorithm which is going to still drive a lot of traffic normally at the end of the day. So what is important? Get friends, get people, know people, ask people to give your game reviews.

For example, if you have a Discord server that you have some people in there who like your game because you did play test for example, ask them to give reviews as fast as possible because until you are at those 10 reviews you do not matter to Steam and one other like important thing here is you cannot gift these games. If you gift someone a Steam copy of your game or if you give them a key then those reviews will not count for the the algorithm.

So you need to get to those 10 reviews by them paying money themselves for that game. And getting those reviews whether they're good or bad, I don't care honestly, it's part of how Steam works. Get them as quickly as possible because once again if you wait too long if it takes like more than a day basically to get to those 10 reviews your game is kind of not like dead in the water but the growth is extremely extremely stunted.

So before you even release the game like we always like drum like that's why we do also like live streams on this channel for example. Like hey the game is out now go and review it help us because it is so important. We also when we didn't have a big audience yet we would like go and we would pester like some colleagues or some friends of me and be like hey go and buy this give us a review it would mean a lot to us and it generally does mean a lot to us to get those 10 reviews and actually start playing in the discovery queue.

Now, of course, sometimes you will get negative reviews. Um and sometimes, honestly, my best response is always don't really engage with them. Read them. You're going to feel shitty. Um this is something that will take time for you to develop as a developer, this skill of understanding that these reviews are not aimed at you, the person, but are more aimed at the game. And because you are so close to the game, it may feel like an attack on you, the person.

These things suck to read. I'm going to be honest with you, and especially when they write like these giant books, but no matter what, I've seen too many developers make this mistake. If someone leaves a negative review, that's their right, and responding to that as a developer always ends up badly, usually. Being like, "Oh, but you didn't play the game as intended." Or like, "This is your opinion." I've seen so many stupid developers respond to reviews, and they respond emotionally.

They respond like the review was an attack on them themselves as the person, and it backfires. You're only going to get more more negative reviews. There was like a recent thing with like Outbound, for example, where developers responded on it, and then people like, "Oh, they're begging for like getting a positive review." I know there are some developers who also go through the negative reviews, and then respond to all of them and be like, "Hey, we fixed these issues.

If you could change your review, it would mean a lot to us." I'm going to be honest, we also tried that. One, it kind of sucks. Two, >> [sighs and gasps] >> most of the time it's kind of meaningless. Not like meaningless, but the impact is pretty low. Most people who have left a review will not change it again. And once again, the risk of you offending a person by responding to their review, especially if it is not just 100% factual of like, "Hey, we solved this problem that you talked about in the review.

Here's the like patch notes or whatever." And nothing else. Don't ask for like changing the review or giving it another go. It just happens. And especially when you see posts like this, the very long ones, I'm you know, this is so long. One thing that you as the developer may then get is feel like, "Oh, no, I need to fix this. There's something big with my game wrong. I need to put out these fires. And that's where you get the problem of post-launch updates as well.

So, reviews is one thing, post-launch updates is another one. Where once you release a game and it doesn't go great, you will automatically try to scramble and like try to save a failing or like a meh game. And once again, I understand it. I've been there just as well. The problem is then that I see developers who get stuck for like 6 months trying to update games that are already out. Your game will never have as much of an interest spike almost as when the game comes out.

Yes, you can do updates. Yes, you can try those things. We're going to do that for M198 as well. Uh actually, I think the day this video goes out or the day after, there should be a different capsule here that announces like our new service pack two update. But, you should understand that those updates will be a tiny drop in the bucket at the end of the day in terms of return investment versus just having made a better game or making a better game instead.

I think my general suggested flow is the first week after you release your game, you put out fires. There's like oh, there's a bug with milestones. Oh, there's a a bug with save load. Oh, there's this quality of life thing that's actually really, really annoying. Ship those features as fast as possible because that is when you still have a lot of momentum, when reviews still have a lot of impact. You want to make sure that hey, any problems that I have with this game, they do quickly get solved.

But, after that, you'll see like the game kind of like equ- reaches an equilibrium where the amount of support requests goes down a lot. What you can do then, and that's what we're doing, and that's what I would suggest is okay, then you take some time and you read through all of the reviews and you look at all the Steam discussions and you look at all of the feedback and how do people actually play this game? And based on that, you can plan like one big update.

That's what we're doing with service pack two, for example, where we're like okay, we have one extra mechanic we're going to add, we have a bunch of quality of life things we're going to change. We're going to wrap it all up in one big update, cuz we're like fixing some achievement issues as well, but like they're not critical achievement issues. We push it and that's it. We kind of move on from that point. Now, don't don't be too loud about hey, we're moving on now to your your players.

They don't like that um because they it's a whole different side tangent, but if they pay you seven bucks, they feel like uh you are owned your entire life to them. But you want to make a next game because the potential upside of making a next better game now that you know more cuz you've released a game now is infinitely higher than trying to save a game that's kind of struggling or that didn't really get enough traction when the game launched.

That is something that unfortunately only happens in fairy tales for the most part. Yes, Among Us did it. No, you're not Among Us. Just make a new game that's better. Cuz often also you're going to be kind of burnt out on the game. You want to try something new, something fresh. You're going to make better games and more profitable games by just making more games versus trying to make the exact same game better. Of course, if you have a million-dollar game, then the equation changes, but I'm assuming if you're watching this video, you may not have a million-dollar game yet.

One quick note that I have as well based on this that I also see developers struggle with sometimes is this concept called visibility rounds. It's not really worth it um from my experience. So, we did visibility rounds cuz we did like some big updates for this was one of our games, My Virtual Friends. It gave us 2,500 views. It gave us 78 page visits. And the visibility rounds is kind of if you do a bigger update, you can do new visibility rounds which technically triggers discovery queue a little bit more, but the impact once again is so low.

Just make a new game. Just make a new game that's better. Uh but don't think like oh, I still have visibility rounds. I need to push more updates because this way I'm going to get more money. These stats unfortunately aren't there. It's not just for me, it's for a lot of other developers that I speak to as well. Now, like I said, the game that really matters is not fixing the old game that you already released and it's like kind of in an okay state.

It's the next game, and if you are like, "Hey, I released my first game. I want to make my next game even better." cuz you realize that, "Hey, making a game is actually pretty hard." I know all about that. And you want to work together with me to make your next game even better, there's a link down below uh in the description where you can find out some more information if you'd like me to help you make your next game even better.

And that brings us to the next point, and I'm not writing this just to flex, but here you can see our revenue uh for 2 months basically. I'm doing 2 months, you'll see why in a second. Um we made $70,000 in 2 months. Realistically, it was like we made 400 bucks in March, and then the rest was in April. One thing that you you you think like, "Oh, this is solid. 70,000 bucks, that's like what I make in a year or something." I don't know where you live.

But this is a high amount of money, right? What a lot of developers don't know is what do they actually take home from that. So, we have $70,000 in gross revenue. This is before refunds, this is before the Steam cut, and before taxes. Those are like the three big uh values. Now, here okay, we see $70,000. Let's actually take a look. You have like Steam uh reports where you can see like the full breakdown of what they actually pay out.

Don't look at all these numbers, but this is the payment history for our company. And take a look at these three: March, April, and April. I'm adding March because our custom minimum payout we didn't like What game we'll talk about it in a second. Our payout in April was these three line items combined. So, you got 400 bucks from March, 39,759 bucks from April, and then these $103. This is our Steam store credit basically that because you earn over 1,000 bucks you get that as well.

It's a separate line item. That's already a big jump going from this 70,000, right? 30,000 bucks gone in an instant. Steam refunds, taxes, and the 30% to Steam. Daddy Gabe's yachts need to be paid somehow, right? Uh so, if we go and take a look at our bank, we can see here we received 40,264 US dollars and 76 cents. This was the transaction that came into our USD bank account. We're in Belgium, so usually we work in euro.

More on that later. Just a processing on receiving a USD transaction cost is $48 in our bank. This is unfortunately, if you're using a traditional bank, pretty normal. And then we get to the uh the second problem. Okay, we have dollars now, but I live in Belgium. Our accounting works in euro, and all of that we need to convert this. So, we converted this from USD to euro, and this is in Dutch. Uh but basically, we paid another $402.16 on top of this $48 to put this number into euro. 450 bucks to convert our money just to euro, which once again, percentually is like kind of still like 1%, 1 and a bit percent.

That's still a lot of [ __ ] money, I think. Um this is something I only realized now, and this is also why, for example, uh we sometimes have our custom minimum payout threshold not met, because I put it at 500 bucks, because otherwise like the Steam transaction fees for a non-euro bank are too high. But having seen this, um get something like Wise. Get a neobank. There's other things, Payoneer, that are designed more for these transactions.

You can get these business accounts. They cost like 50 euros uh to set up. But as you can see here, if I wanted to convert that exact number, 42 40,264 euros and 76 cents, dollars, sorry, not euros, we would pay $108 in fees. One quarter basically of what we have to pay our traditional bank, and that means that out of basically $70,000 gross, we get basically half of that in euro. Now, of course, in US dollar, you would get still a little bit more, because you don't have to convert it again.

But keep this thing in mind. I think this is something that a lot of developers aren't aware of. You see like, oh, I made 5K gross this month, I can quit my job. And it's like, psych, you can't, because once again, there's more business stuff as well. Then you need to keep in mind, okay, I'm in Belgium, so out of this 20% technically if I have profit would go to taxes. Also, if I want to pay myself out, the company needs to pay taxes.

It gets more complicated, but do not make the mistake of looking at how much money you made in lifetime revenue and then building your life based on the gross revenue number when the net revenue number is just a lot lower. And then I think the last thing that you should do that I think a lot of developers aren't aware of is like putting out the fires for yourself. You've put out the fires for your players the last week, like the week after your launch, but my god, please take care of yourself as in like the final few weeks before your game launches, your life will be consumed by your game.

And that's not exactly a bad thing. Launching your game is the most important event in your game's life cycle basically, more than any part of development or post-launch. So, you want to make your launch as good as possible, which means you're also going to be spending as much time on your launch as possible, sending out emails to contactors last minute, doing some updates to the store page, adding that final bit of polish.

Those things are good, but they will take up your time, they will take up your life, and it's going to be the core only thing basically you're going to focus on for those weeks. And once you've put out those fires, you need to put out the fire that's yourself, or you're going to burn out. You need to kind of take a break for yourself, go out on on walks like this. I like to stare at the turtles. There's a lot of birds coming.

There you go. And just know that having released a game it's not the end. Also, you want to keep making more games, but it's going to be a mentally heavy toll if immediately after you release your game, you're like, I need to make the next game. Whether it's a $0 game or a million-dollar game, give yourself like a week off not doing nothing, because if you're a grinder like me, you'll go crazy. You'll want to work, which I think is also very good, but give yourself low-stakes works.

Don't feel like the next game idea you get immediately is going to be the next game you're going to commit six months of your life to, or however long. And I think that is a big one as well. Just regain some of your life again, and then get started on the next game only once you've done that. So, I have to say, I hope this video taught you some more stuff. If you made it this far, you're probably extremely handsome um and and a chat developer.

So, leave a comment down below as for what was something that you learned about releasing your game for the first time that you kind of were unaware of. That's all I have to say. See you guys in the next one.