If you have been following the indie game scene during the last couple of weeks, you’ll probably have heard about the “Steam algorithm” changes.
Valve has updated the algorithm that drives the recommendations in the Steam store, trying to make it “fairer”, and to show to better game recomendations that a user would probably want to play, based on their likes.
However, this has not been welcomed by game developers, that have seen their games visibility suddenly dropping. The most affected games seem to be games that have not been released yet, and that were relying on Steam recommendations to attract users to their store page and try to make users add the game to their wishlist, so they will notice when the game is released. It seems one of the changes in the recommendations is to shift them to games that are actually released, so users can actually play them, instead of just see future releases and just add them to a wishlist.
This has caused the surface of a hidden problem in the marketing strategy of said games: Depending on a single source of traffic to bring visibility to their game. Many of those games were only relying on the Steam recommendations to attract new users (possible future users in the case of wishlists), and are seeing all that incoming traffic disappear in a blink.
The dependency on a single traffic source is always a bad idea, and it’s even worse when you don’t have any control of it, and just rely on a third party that can make changes unilaterally, without notice or consent.
That’s why we always recommend finding alternative traffic sources to your game webpage or store page, and try to find sources you can control, like social media posts, writing on your blog or other pages that might attract possible users, or creating campaigns on social media that could help to offset the drop of traffic from another source.
Helping you to find or create alternate sources of traffic is one of the ways we can help you to improve your game sales, so don’t hesitate in contacting us 😉