Equilibrium is the most anime a non anime medium ever.
Slain: Back From Hell (including DLC) is the Chrono.gg deal of the day, just $1.99. That's worth it right? It's been on my wishlist for ages and that's the cheapest I've ever seen it...
Particularly I found it terrible even on sale and is the only game I refunded for thinking it's bad. Level design is atrocious and many small tweaks you expect from a platformer are not there. It feels like devs didn't research how those games were being done thirty years ago. Combat is extremely linear and boring, also being punishing as an excuse for being "hardcore" or "deep". Presentation was absolutely not enough to save how bad it feels to play the game IMO.
Really interesting article about purchase behaviors on Steam
https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/ChrisZukowski/20190906/350248/How_Steam_users_see_your_game.php
Makes you wonder how more barren stores fail at triggering that sale. So many little details are paramount to catching peoples interest.
This is super cool. Particularly I always click on games that sound funny (or a disaster) from their name or short description, just to check out if my expectations are met by the store page. I find fun just looking around stuff even if it's not my style of game. Game screenshots are a pretty interesting thing; a lot of the times I don't think they are any help at all, and many indie games try to make movie style trailers that also don't tell me how the game plays so it's hard to make a decision without hunting down reviews or an actual gameplay video. Other times they are enough for me to get a sense of "ah, it's a 2D Metroidvania" or "ah, it's a FPS going for a comedic tone", but they hardly are able to showcase what makes the game unique in its genre or setting, and since store page descriptions are 90% of the cases hyperbolic marketing speak or simply homogenously vague ("game features many builds because it has leveling" "unravel the mystery of who your father was while delving deep into demon's territory"), the video may make or break if I'm going to keep informing myself or leave it for later. Since that is the information I'm looking for, long intros trying to be mysterious or focused too much in the story get skipped like the devil skips the church on sundays. If it's not a VN or a point and click, show the game
being played, show off your art direction and the characters first.
And no, I'm not watching 3 or 4 trailers in a store page, stop with that devs.
Participants wanted those 4 screen shots to show them what type of game they are hovering over. So I would recommend showing the 4 distinct points of your game's core gameplay loop. For instance if you have a survival/crafting game I would prioritize the following 4 screenshots:
1 that is someone exploring a beautiful open world
1 that is them collecting something (including the UI that says "pick" or "cut" or whatever)
1 of the crafting menu
1 of the character holding up the newly-crafted item
Highly agree with this. Lemme see the UI and menus that I'm expected to use. That helps a lot to "get" what the game is about and how it is played even if it's not a menu heavy game. It's like showing off the interior of a car - I want to know how I am going to sit there, what colors and textures I'm going to see while actually using the vehicle and not looking at him parked at the garage.
Now you might think trailers are the first thing they watch (it makes sense - they auto-play they are fully animated etc) but time and time again I saw most participants click right past the trailer to the screenshots. Most participants didn't even turn on the sound. I think this is because too many trailers have long logo intros and cinematics which participants didn't care about because it doesn't tell them the gameplay or the genre.
Absolutely. Long ass intros, sudden high pitched volume, and the fact I hate autoplaying in general, rarely Steam trailers get played with sound on for me. Some of the most crude and badly edited amateur trailers for indie games are the most informative, since they are just a sequence of shot gameplay clips. May look not polished or professional, but it's giving me what I want ASAP. A store is not a theater where I am doing nothing but watching carefully everything that comes up on the screen.
One of the test participants was from Indonesia and said that because of his internet connection, Steam trailers are very slow to load and so he never watches them.
Also this, yeah. Basically, if I'm watching your trailer I'm already wanting to want your game, or at least am very intrigued by what screenshot and description gave me.
The images In the game page accurately convey the verbs of the game and ultimately caused him to wishlist it.
In short, yeah, this. Too many store pages fail at this simple idea.
And to add something he doesn't cover: if you are going to have your store page localized to other languages... please, try your best to hire someone who plays games and
give some context of your game to them. Far too many times (including for AAA titles) I see things that aren't supposed to be translated or some specific made up term/name that is awkwardly positioned in a sentence because the translator clearly had no clue what it is that just make the game description sound off, weird, amateurish and with a layer of noise that makes it harder to extract important information from. It's one thing when you are a solo developer without a full grasp in another language and tried to summarize your game, it's another when you have an obviously fully translated description from a template that is trying to awkwardly localize game terms in ways no native speaker ever used them.