![]() ![]() This is particularly important for games leaving Early Access, as you can’t increase the price at Early Access launch and also run a launch discount. You can’t discount your game for 30 days following a price increase.Discounts cannot be run within two months of each other unless they are Valve organised Steam events.įor instance, you could participate in the Winter Sale and then the Lunar (New Year) Sale but you couldn’t run your own discount in December and then participate in the Lunar Sale without waiting two months.That means if you’re looking to launch in the Summer it might not be worth doing a launch discount and instead opt to participate in the Steam Summer Sale, which tends to get a lot of attention from press and players alike. If you run a discount on launch you can’t run any other discounts for two months.Here is a bullet point breakdown of everything you’ll need to know. If you think your game could potentially benefit from taking part in the deluge of sales now part and parcel of the industry then it’s important you understand the rules, particularly on Steam as they’re quite rigid. If you feel the pricing is exactly right then stick to it, it’s never a good look to greatly undervalue your work and there have been plenty of successful games that have never been on sale. And, don’t forget, you don’t have to put your game on sale or include it in a bundle. So, it’s something to have a long think about. Price your game wrong, or don’t take sales into account when you’re launching and it could have a significant impact on launch sales. Still, thinking about sales from the get-go is important in today’s digital landscape, especially so if you’re launching exclusively on PC. It’s quite common for developers to offer discounts on launch during the first few days to help bolster sales and help you reach that all-important trending list.Īlthough, that might not be as easy for indies anymore with Steam’s reported algorithm changes. Sales aren’t just for the latter stages of your game’s lifespan though. These suggest that sales can be a significant booster to a game’s lifetime revenue and increase visibility long after your initial release window. There isn’t a lot of hard data out there to definitively answer this, but there is a lot of anecdotal evidence put forward by developers through post-mortems. It’s a good question, you wouldn’t want to potentially undercut what people are willing to pay for your game. The first thing you’re probably going to ask yourself is, ‘should I put my game on sale?’. Approaching sales with the right attitude and planning could significantly increase chances of success in a market often described as oversaturated. Getting your head around these avenues to market and how to take advantage of them should be crucial to any PR plan laid out for your game. Game distribution sites such as Humble Bundle, Green Man Gaming and the variety of ‘key’ provider sites also offer games well below full price. ![]() This article will primarily cover Steam but the sale mentality doesn’t end there. It’s particularly important indie devs understand this digital landscape and how it functions to better take advantage of it in a period of stiff competition for visibility and success. ![]() Interested players might prefer to follow the titles they’re interested in and await their inevitable discount in the next sale, instead of buying them full price day one. With this change, we’ve seen tools such as Wishlists become ever more important. These never-ending discounts have reshaped the PC market and dictate how a large majority of customers now engage with and purchase games. We’ve reached a point in the digital distribution of video games now where there is always a sale of some kind, somewhere online. ![]()
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