30 Minute Steam Page Makeovers

[Music] hi welcome to gdc this is my talk 30 minute steam page makeovers how to make a page that wows i'm chris sukowski thanks for being here one of my favorite things are these home makeover shows you know where they start with an ugly house and then they make it look good and um i just don't always was so inspired by them and i wanted to try something similar to that today for some reason they always have to be leaning on something some sort of ladder or something you gotta lean a lot if you're in construction i guess i don't know but my favorite part is when they do the before and after they have like this really bad looking picture and then they make it look pretty at the end of the show um i want to do that i'm basically the bob vela of steam pages i'm a consultant and i help developers and indies and studios big companies small companies publishers make their steam pages work for them i make pages that wow so what i want to talk to you about this is everything that i've

learned so i write a weekly blog at howtomarketagain.com that's where i live and i kind of learn the ins and outs of steam pages and kind of publish my results on this other class it's totally free called how to make a steampage.com so between those two i've kind of learned a lot about steam so what i wanted to do was take everything that i learned from the last gdc talk that i gave my last one last year was called empathizing with steam how buyers see your game i gave a lot of information but there's not as many like how-to facts for how to make your page better this year it's all going to be about how to make a page better so let's dive in now this is going to apply to first time devs if you still haven't made your page maybe your page is super early also it's going to apply to devs who have been around they've created multiple games maybe you've got a new one in the works so you can learn from something from this and it's also going to apply if maybe you released a game several years ago and just haven't updated in a while and you kind of moved on with your life uh but that steam page

still exists steam's actually pretty good at promoting old games so this might help can the sweep away the cobwebs and update your old game i'm going to show you how so these are going to be real world examples um i've gotten permission from the devs that i'm going to show some of these are my actual clients some of these are folks who've just shared their numbers with me they said oh i took a class and i learned something here look at this so i'm going to tell you when that happens but there are going to be times when i show the before and after and i just want to be clear that i'm you know these pages are a work in progress always so it's not that they were bad or lazy devs or anything if the page didn't look great at the beginning it's really that pages should be posted live as soon as you're ready um don't wait too long don't pine and work so hard to make it absolutely perfect i commend the devs who just put their page up get started make their page live that's the way you should be doing it um so don't feel bad if your page uh doesn't meet up to the standards

that i have this is all we're all in this to learn together and i'm going to show you how to make it good it's good to be fast and upload what you got now waiting for it to be perfect because the longer you wait the fewer wish list you're going to get okay so the most common problems of steam pages that i see that come across my desk are these i've got this whole talk's gonna be broken down these four main problems the first one is your page just doesn't stand out it's unclear what genre you have number three is not working within the steam algorithm to support your game and then finally your game looks dead or it looks like uh the steam page is no longer being updated what the dreaded dead game so i'm going to show you how to fix all four of these problems with real world examples so let's get started here so let's tackle the first problem which is your page just doesn't stand out um the thing is steam there's a lot of games on there and a lot of them are what we call shovelware or asset flips um they're people who maybe are just

doing this for a hobby or this is their first game or maybe they're just quickly trying to flip a game that they downloaded off the unity asset store now steam shoppers are used to these games they've got a highly tuned sense of what looks like shovelware and what is a flip game you want to make sure that you prove to these steam shoppers that you that is not your game you rise above you are not just an asset flip so i'm going to show you how to rise above and make sure that your page signals that it's a high quality well produced game so here's an example of a before picture this is this game jupiter moons mecca great developer but this is one of their first versions right out of the gate of the page again there's some problems here but it's okay all developers start out somewhere so one of the first things i notice when i first see this page is a lot of the screenshots are very similar you'll notice see how they're green backdrops same city two of the screenshots have the same mech that they're battling on right against it so these kind of lack

of asset difference between your screenshots they're all very similar similar colors similar orientation starts to clue people in maybe this is an asset flip and the reason that is is because usually on the unity asset store you get one asset this is i just pulled this random one off the asset store hot lava so a lot of first time devs will use their one asset in several screenshots uh and sometimes the whole game is just this one asset that they got so if you have several screenshots that are all of this lava asset that signals to steam shoppers oh this is probably just an asset flip they bought that one hot lava asset and the whole game is set in this one world you don't want to do that steam players like deep gameplay so to fix this problem there's three things you got to show unique screenshots you have to have a really good capsule and your game assets should be throughout your page so it looks like it's high res art okay now unique screenshots here's how we do it we're going to show

a variety of environments a variety of visual effects and we're going to show in-game menus yes we're going to show ui now it's better to have fewer screenshots that are unique than i have a whole bunch that are very similar so this is the after effect after we've kind of updated the screenshots with these unique artwork so before you can see that they were similar three green backdrops same background two of the images had the same opponent on there afterwards the dev did a great job switching up the variety you'll notice each backdrop is different different mechs in each one and the third screenshot is actually ui now i'm going to show you when i look in on this ui let's take a look here i love including ui i know it sounds boring it's not exciting it's not like got that wow effect but it signals to steam shoppers that your game has depth and that's the thing that asset flips lack is that gameplay depth when i look at this complex inventory screenshot i don't

quite know what's going on but i can tell that there's something here i see a bunch of hit points lots of stats lots of elements all over the place grids everywhere this screenshot tells shoppers this is a deep game you can sink your teeth into this okay the next way to kind of fix this low res gain kind of like asset flip game how to rise above is better capsules a capsule is steems language for this little image in the top right box of every game here it is half-life alex put a little arrow that's a capsule that that image of half-life alex now i'm going to show you before this is a game called dwarven valley this is their first capsule it's a screenshot of the game now dwarven castle or dwarven valley is a building game you kind of craft items for the villagers and you build your workshop out this capsule includes a screenshot of the game so it's a very beautiful game i think this is a beautiful game but just using the screenshot in the capsule is problematic

and i'm going to show you why now when you just use a screenshot that signals to steam you don't have an arc budget if you even if your game is totally beautiful so i recommend you hire a professional illustrator because no asset flipper is ever going to hire a professional asset flip or a professional illustrator for their game they're just going to grab a screenshot it's cheap it's easy you got to rise above and show that you've got some complexity here and that you can afford this sort of thing so don't use screenshots of your cap for your capsule and also if you have a pixel art game i'm gonna recommend against using pixel art in your capsule and i'll show you why basically your goal here is to signal i am investing money in this game i have spent and hired people that can help me i'm not just using this as a quick asset flip now pixar games i love pixel art i've made pixel art games however in the steam community they have a bad reputation of being cheap games i don't think all pixar games are cheap i just know that in the past

pixar games have been cheap and that's left a bad taste in a lot of steam shoppers minds so what um to stand above a lot of these top tier pixel art games use an illustrated capsule look at this celeste neon abyss even baba's you it's a very simple drawn capsule but you'll notice it's actually illustrated it's not pixel art so to rise above if you have a pixlr game you really should invest in a fully illustrated cover now here we've got uh our capsules after so the developer went back and went and had a great well-illustrated capsule now you'll notice it's got this dwarf he actually renamed the game to kingdom workshop i swear this is the same game and what he did when he changed it out is this character is fully illustrated it's not a model from the game and he actually added some great uh new title art to it kingdom workshop and after implementing this capsule you'll see this increase look at that new capsule a huge spike right after

that capsule immediately he could see the results of implementing this new capsule and it's great um using a capsule that's professionally illustrated is worth the money i find that a capsule will typically cost you about 500 to a thousand dollars usd and that's expensive i know it is it i that's a lot of money but it is worth it it signals that you are investing in your game if this is a business for you you should invest in this it's some of the best money spent so run bake sales mow lawns if you have trouble uh affording this whatever you can do try and figure out how to get a well illustrated professional artist to do your capsule it's worth the money the interesting thing is you'll note that even the capsule for kingdom workshop isn't a screenshot from the game it's it tells you actually less than the screenshot but just by including that illustrated it just that illustrated capsule it just elevates the game to a new level finally to make your game look expensive

as i say um you're you should have game assets throughout your page let me show you what i mean um show don't tell don't have a lot of text to explain your game you want to prove that you have the artist chops to really decorate your steam page in a nice engaging way let me show you what i mean this is a game that i consulted for called whisker squadron and you'll notice there's a section at the bottom called about this game now in the past old steam people used to just fill this with text it's totally logical that's kind of what steam hints that you should do but it's kind of too much text most steam shoppers don't don't read that much so what the developer did was went back pulled gifs of their game now this game is a very beautiful game well animated sharp art it's like a spiritual successor to star fox and you can just see it just by looking at these animated gifs that are just rotating you say ah that looks just like star fox it's so great it's a spiritual successor this is so much more impactful than just

text describing it and so you need to show how vibrant your game is by doing these these animated gifs another great page is this return to nen grim this page is beautiful you'll notice that the whole game the capsule the screenshots the announcements even these little embellishments all over have the same color palette it shows how well art directed this game is it just subtly feels like an expensive game it almost feels not like steam some of the touches that they've added are these little filibri this little like little tiny line work that just looks so cool looks like the game is emerging into steam these sort of like just enhancements that must have cost an artist a hundred of hours you know hundreds of hours to create this stuff it just looks so good like you've invested in your game again you're making yourself look impressive so to make your game and your steam page look expensive like you've invested in this game you need to show a variety of screenshots you got to show some illustrated capsules and you got to pack

your steam page with graphical assets that just show that you've got great art okay let's let's move on to the next problem i see with a lot of steam pages an unclear genre what do you do in this game that's a common problem that shoppers have when they come to your page and a lot of first-time devs just have a problem getting this into their steam page so i'm going to show you how to do this okay steam audience knows their genres i know we're developers and we're omnivorous we're excited to try any game but most typical gamers are very specific in the games they like and they don't like when i was doing my study i got a lot of quotes from people saying oh this looks like mario party no thank you like immediately they didn't even have to consider the game they knew that this game was like a party game and they didn't like party games so they moved on these type of quotes are common among steam shoppers know their genre and most will move on if it's not your genre which sounds bad but they're excited when it actually is the genre they like so you need to be very clear with your

genre let me show you this is a description this is the short description which is the text right under the capsule this is for a game i hid the name because i i don't like to speak bad about a game but i think that this description could be improved so let me show you what i mean the year is 1983 the world teeters on the verge of destruction as the cold war tightens its icy grip east or west trust no one question everything the fate of humanity rests in your hands as you pit spy versus spy now this description is very evocative but i don't know the genre do you know the genre i didn't include pictures because i didn't want to hint at what it was but if you think about this could be an fps it could be a visual novel it could be an rpg it could be a tactical strategy game a real-time strategy game any of those genres this could be anywhere they're basically describing the surface coat and not the actual gameplay this is a problem because it's hard to determine what the genre of this game is so here's how we're going to fix this

we're going to write better short descriptions we'll also fix this by showing better screenshots that hint towards the genre and we're going to be very trope conscious in our console in our capsules because the capsules will hint as to what type of game this is so let's take a look here a lot of short descriptions describe the feeling the the emotions what the graphics look like which is kind of a mistake because right to the side of the short descriptions are pictures this is from a great looking game called uh blair witch project and you'll notice they don't have to write that this is a spooky game you just look at the screenshots you're like this is a spooky game this is a horror-based in the woods game so they can eliminate all those words from their description they can focus on gameplay so let your screenshots and your trailer use to describe the mood and the sh and kind of the feeling of the game don't waste words describing feeling screenshots will do that instead i like to make my short descriptions verb focused write down what you literally do in the game what verbs do you use some some helpful hints

for writing your short description these are kind of thought experiments i like to do say write down all the verbs that happen when you push each of the face buttons if you're using a controller on this game what are those verbs those verbs should appear in your short description what happens if you die in the game do you um do you die forever does a world reset what happens when you die that can really hint at the genre is it a roguelike where the world resets maybe that really hints to it also describe how time works is it real time is it turn based is there a real world clock uh what is it is it like animal crossing where whatever day it is today is the time in animal crossing all those things help hint to your genre so describe these things in your short description here are some good examples these are short descriptions that i really like dead cells is a roguelike action roguelike metroidvania inspired action platformer right there genre straight in away i love this short description fall guys fall guys is massively multiplayer

party game up to 60 players online in a free-for-all struggle through round and round of escalating chaos until one victor remains perfect that's a perfect encapsulation of the genre it shows verbs it shows a genre it shows that it's multiplayer perfect most important thing is you should be clear short descriptions work in conjunction with all your other assets so if it feels like you missed out the fact that it's a spooky game in your short description that's okay because the heavy lifting of your theming is going to be covered by those screenshots off to the side so don't feel like your short description has to carry everything and have to enrapture all that is your game your whole steam page works around with the rest of your short description so let's talk about being crystal clear with your genre by getting better screenshots so this is these are screenshots for the new uh resident evil village game great game it's got great marketing but their screenshots don't really tell you what kind of genre it is it's just a man screaming a big sweaty man screaming a

zombie man i don't know like why like what genre is that am i controlling that guy am i shooting that guy is this a real-time strategy where he's like in my army that i'm i'm going towards somebody it's unclear what is happening in the screenshot it's evocative but it doesn't tell you how to play the game um i know that you know because it's resident evil several sequels what is it seven or eight i can't remember but that you don't have that luxury this is probably your first game in the series so you don't have that luxury of knowing what the past genre was you need to be specific in your screenshots so let's fix it i just went to a youtube video of somebody playing the game this is a much better screenshot telling more about this game look you know it's a first-person shooter now there's a gun in the front like just like all first-person shooters i know that there's 10 bullets so that means that i'm going to be limited on my resources there's an inventory on the left that tells me oh i've got limited weapons i've got to figure out which weapon there's a knife so it's gonna be some close hand-to-hand combat there's only one guy so it's gonna be like tougher

enemies if you get the right screenshots you can tell more about your game rather than just some screaming sweaty zombie man so really look at your screenshots and really pick ones that emphasize your genre let's talk about trope-conscious capsules so i don't know if you realize but your capsules really evoke the genre if you're doing a crafting game a builder you gotta include a hammer look at all these building games include that hammer part of the reason i think that that kingdom workshop changed that capsule change was it evoked the genre it was a crafting building game and look what's that guy the little troll have it's got a hammer gotta include the hammer if you got a crafting game simulator games you got to put the vehicle that you're simulating and then you've got to write the name of the simulator in italicized full bodied impact science era font and then outline it with black text black outline i don't know why that's just the genre trope all these simulator games look this similar way um if you're doing a space game you got to have a pinkish purpley capsule you

got to have some planet sections you got to have a spaceship where you have the trails coming behind it and then you gotta write your title in white text i didn't make these rules somehow they just kind of evolve naturally your genre is very dependent on the art style so study the other capsules and games in your genre look at recent capsules because these trends change you know if you're watching this video in two or three years from now it could be a different trend but just be aware of the current context of your genre and then when people see those subconsciously like i bet that's a space game it kind of there's like a purple space uh you know planet that i'm flying over in this screenshot or in this capsule must be a space game that's the feeling you want to evoke so you want your capsule to mirror the other genres you're in so let's do a recap here's how to tell genre to your shoppers and be crystal clear on your steam page have a short description that describes gameplay in genre tropes use screenshots that actually show ui and are indicative of your genre and then finally have

capsules that are in line with other games in your genre you can innovate but you should also keep some elements that have those hints towards the other genres maybe a hammer here or there or trails on the spaceship here's a bonus genre faq that somebody always asks me whenever i talk about genres and making sure that they're similar what if i have two genres my game's a mix okay be honest with yourself usually with these mixed genres usually there's one trunk genre that's the main part of the game and then a second john is kind of stapled on the side in a nice way stapled um if that's the case focus your genre that you should follow is still the main genre whatever your trunk genre is that's like 75 percent of your game is deshona but if you're honest and you're saying no no really it's 50 50. half this show and a half the shine if that's the case you can actually change your steam page all the time your steam page is not set in stone so maybe one month you switch it to one genre then you swipe it to a different genre on the next month and

you keep swapping back back and forth and then kind of monitor does one genre that you focus on perform better than the other genre maybe so try it out just test sometimes fans of one genre don't like the other genre okay third problem not working with the steam algorithm this one is really indicative of of having to understand steam the way steam makes their money is they know down to the minute how much people play each game each player has a record of which games they like the best according to steam and all the steam algorithm does is it looks at which games the player plays the most of and then shows them more games in the same genre you'll look at all these widgets all over steam i just grab screenshots it says recommend it because you played these games because you like this game you like this you've played hours of this game here's why we're recommending this game so you need to program the widget the algorithm so that these widgets will show your game to fans of your genre and the way you do that is with tags so this

is a game the before screenshot of a game they took my class called just read the instructions great game on steam it's first person shooter but if you look at their tags which is very small let me show you a zoomed in when you look at the tags they weren't quite there yet so i'm going to show you how to do this now tags control everything for the for the steam algorithm steam can't use some machine learning algorithm to figure out what kind of genre you have it's all based on tags so you must tag correctly here are three games that are if you're making a roguelike key games um to do the tagging i just have this spreadsheet and what i do is i find three games that are the top of the ranks everybody plays these games in the genre and then i just list out the tags that are associated with each one of these from steam and then i go across all three columns and i figure out all the ones that appear in all three of these games those are your tags as long as they do apply to your game

so uh the just read the instructions developers read read what i kind of recommend for them and then afterwards they improve their tags on their game so here's the before and after notice before they had shooter action puzzle pve but they didn't have fps they added the fps tag because all the games they studied had that they also did online co-op because that one was in both they took out action again i can't tell you it's dependent on each game you've got to do your own research but for these guys this new combination is what they picked based on their research they also added more steam features and they added animated gifs because they're about this game section didn't have any animakers guess what happened immediate spike you can see right where they made that tagging change isn't that amazing look at that and their steam wishlist went right up along with that increased traffic what's going on here is steem saw the tag change and it said whoa this looks like an fps now they've got very clear fps tags i'm going to show them to fans of fps's

and then all the fans from steam were like yes this is an fps game they looked right at those great gifts everything and they started wishlisting that game because steam showed it to them because steam was very had a better understanding of what their game was okay here's the fourth problem fourth and final you got a dead game i hate this term but steam fans use it all the time this typically applies to early access games or games that have been out for a while that haven't been updated here's how to fix the dead game problem do steam update events post in your steam forums and add text to your capsules okay so this is i pulled this from r slash steam i love r steam because you see what the real fans say um they they were commenting that it's mysterious when games are updated but nobody updates their patch notes they say i look for events and there's none they want us to put events every time you update your game so you got to write those let me show you an example here's a game called chicken police really good game their events are like a textbook case of what you should do so check out chicken

police look at their events um that's the section down here they do a devlog their dev blogs are like a mix of the game and the person's lifestyle of the developers lives it's that's great just just look at their their events perfect case this shows that your game is alive when you post these another game quest of dungeons in their uh this is a great idea they had is um in their forums they actually have a pinned message that just has a version number and a bullet point list of everything that changed do this this just then people can see how many updates you've done that you're an active dev this is good stuff okay also posting your steam forms i know the forums are kind of cruddy sometimes but at the bare minimum pin an faq that says common questions like when it's coming to switch they always ask when it's coming to switch just have an answer here also whether you support ultra widescreen 60fps they're going to ask you that too have a comment i have a reason for that whether you are or you're not but pin that faq in your

forum also pin a discussion thing of where to find you list your twitter your discord all that stuff and if you're not going to be on the forums tell them there say hey i'm just not checking the forums i just don't have time you can check in their discord here's a link to it i'm always there that kind of stuff just shows that you're communicating with your audience and that you just haven't abandoned your game it's not dead finally add text to your capsules when you update it or you have a sale this is cool i pull these i always grab a screenshot anytime i see somebody who's puts text in their castle i think it's great and they just give little little descriptions of what's new like uh neon abyss had an event called titan's event advent not event advent uh elite dangerous has new content available season two of fall guys is live there's a new demo for potioncraft at a glance you can see what's new in the game this thing really helps do this for any big sale especially at the seasonal sales like winter sale that kind of stuff anytime you do an update i don't know in the description of what it is so to fix the not dead game problem add

steam event updates fans are looking for them they really do read them post in your forums add texture capsules all that stuff but most importantly you do have to update your game keep it keep it active that's how you not have a dead game okay how to implement this your mileage may vary there's a lot of things i just described some games need one of these things that i talked about some games need other things you just got to try all of them just kind of experiment here's the thing some games that have really high quality art already the changes aren't as good you know they won't have as big an impact like on dwarven valley like swapping out from a low quality um capsule to a very high quality one that was a big jump in quality if you've already got a high quality game you might not see those impacts um and if your game is not good in the arts not good i'm sorry these changes might not help steam audience is very savvy they can't be fooled so you got to make a good game have a scientific mindset be open to changes see if they work if they don't work try a different change don't give up

don't say this is hopeless and nothing's changing and test what i say don't just believe everything i say test it yourself try it out see what works and then monitoring success i don't like to look at the the impression versus conversion rate click through that's kind of a murky number steems very noisy i like to look at the number of wishlists that's the core number look at the number of wish lists track it weekly track it daily if you improve your tags you're going to see a spike on discover queue that's the only time i like the visibility marketing invisibility so go to this page to see whether your tag changes have an impact you'll see a spike in discovery queue that indicates you've got good tags okay keep a diary every time you make a change every day track this data if you want to get this chart there's a template how to make a steampage.com i give you information on how to track this let's make a better steam page there's my twitter account my email if you need help with anything email me how to make a game how to market a game.com that's my weekly blog how to make a steam page that's my free class good luck everybody

have that scientific mindset you're going to do great i love you bye you