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Visibility is everything. It’s so much more important than anything that you can sacrifice everything else to gain more visibility on the front page, but it’s not easy. In that sense, it’s much more important than if you have a good game, good scores, optimum price, good promo materials, and awareness. But all these work to increase your chance of visibility on the front page. It seems.

I am the founder and the producer of Nowhere Studios and we released our first game Monochroma on Steam more than a month ago. Monochroma is a physics based platformer focused on a silent narrative. A method which is rarely used in movies and almost never used in games that tells a deep story. We wanted to make players think about the consumer society and our story questions the responsibilities of an individual to the people around them and to the society using a dystopian setting in which robots are sold as a merchandise. As visuals was our most important weapon to deliver our message, visuals and the story have been iterated a million of times during the development. We gave references to tons of movies, books and games. We are quite happy with the final product in that sense.



We've been developing Monochroma since 2011 with a core team of 8 people and there have been around 30 contributors joining in and leaving in 3 years. Total budget of the game was around $750 k spent mostly for the developers salaries. We also had some marketing budget to pay for the PR agencies, attend GDC San Francisco two times, GDC Europe and GameX.

The game have been received extremely well in previews but it had terrible scores after the release mainly because of technical flaws that we fixed most of it in two weeks after the release. We still have some minor optimization problems but not enough to overshadow the overall quality of the game from my perspective and regarding the feedbacks I'm gathering.



Whatever the reason, we couldn't make any sales. I blame market visibility.



Those who would like to know more about our detailed sales report can contact me through e-mail. But on this article, having discussed with other developers and analyzed day by day our own data, I’m going to suggest some best practices and try to develop an overall strategy to adapt to the market conditions. Because the current structure on Steam forces devs to become a bestseller to survive. If you don’t have that potential you can’t sell anything.

I’m telling this because I’m upset we only got one hour of visibility on the front page and not in the main capsule, just the featured part below that, after burning 3 years of development. We even lost the visibility on the new releases section in two days. But I’m not writing this to complain. I just want to warn you if you had something else in mind. In the first place, we chose PC as a platform because it was less riskier than mobile. But Steam also became a hit-driven marketplace and you should act accordingly.

Here is an article worth reading (you might want to read the comments as well) on Kotaku.

Cynical Brit discussed the topic from both the dev and player perspective as well.

Steam Documentation on Visibility

I am pasting the part below from the documentation on Steam. You can skip if you already read it. I don’t know if I’m allowed to post but I haven’t seen any warning against sharing.

“As a baseline, your product will get 1 Million views on the home page when released fully. Here's how it works:

As soon as your product releases, it is added to a pool of titles that have also just released.

Each time a logged-in Steam user visits the Steam Store home page, the system selects three titles from that pool to appear in the 'Featured PC Games' section (or Mac or Linux, as appropriate for your title).

When your title is rendered in this way, it counts as a view.

Your product will get roughly 1 Million views in this way. The length of time that takes may vary, depending on how many other products have just released and how much traffic there is on the front page of the Store at that time.

You will get data about the number of views your item gets and how many users click on your product in this area.

After The First Million Views

If your product proves to sell well during the first million views, it will continue to be featured in that space for more views. The formula used to determine these additional views will change as we tune the system.

If your product is doing really well, it may get bumped up into the Main capsule on the front page. These titles are currently hand-picked as we try to determine what customers are most interested in buying and playing.”

In other words, if your game can’t beat other games in sales during the first hour, you will be destined to rot in the depths of the platform.

Conversion to Clicks

This seems one of the things that seem to determine if you’re doing good or bad on your launch. This is how it looks from our end: