As a long-standing steam user, I always feel that our marketing strategy on steam is way too conservative. The Thrive Steam page says:
We are offering Thrive on Steam to reach a wider audience.
But IMHO, the page is still more like for existing Thrive supporters: we regularly write devblogs to update our progress, but no promotions or any other move to attract new potential players. So here are some of my suggestions:
Add Demo
Add free to play demo with limited game content, e.g. only microbe stage is opened. I know we already have free versions of Thrive on github, but for people who only explore games on steam, some free trial on that platform is much more attractive.
Add recent trailer to gallery
If we have a new trailer for latest release, we should add it to the “gallery” Thrive’s steam store page. As a result, players can know what’s recently updated at the first glance of our steam page.
Make Bundles with other games
In steam, we can make bundles (like the Thrive & Soundtrack bundle) with other games, so that when buying the games together (or the rest games in the bundle) , players will get a discount. And the benefit for us is that Thrive can be seen in the cooperating games’ steam page.
I think we can try to contact some biology games first? Actually I already have a list right now.
I would personally feel quite silly trying to make a demo version of Thrive by trying to lock out parts of a free game…
And also how often would the demo need to be updated? Even if the demo is just the microbe stage, almost every release we have changes to it. So would we have to update the demo as well for each Thrive release?
Do games do that? I can’t recall seeing an update trailer on the store page, because most players going to the page are first-time people so them seeing a trailer just about new updates is going to be a bit confusing.
Also all of our trailers would need one more cut, one suitable for Steam distribution (our current trailers are unusable for this purpose due to the ending screens).
This I think can be a bit of a bit ask as for the latest trailer we didn’t get Youtube shorts or Instagram cuts so the latest trailer is not posted in those places either…
Yeah, sure.
I do wonder why no biology games have contacted us proactively to join a bundle so far…
Oh sorry for the late reply, I completely forget this post.
I think I have 2 main points about the demo:
we need a demo on steam to attract more people, cuz not every steam user can and will use github to get free version of Thrive.
the content of demo version cannot be equal to the release version, otherwise it will affect our sales on steam.
so the summation is that we might need to release such a silly demo version.
I’ve seen games that update demo frequently, and I also know some games that they haven’t update their demo for a long time.
So the answer is: we can update them every 6-12 months, but a much longer update interval is also acceptable.
Some games (usually continuously maintained (online) games) will set their overall trailer as the first piece in the steam store page’s gallery, and the newest trailer as the second piece, followed by static pictures, and last of them are previous trailers.
I think this is an optional choice, could be omitted if too much work needs to be done.
It is silly. But I also have no doubt that a significant number of people who buy Thrive just don’t know about the free version, which is also silly.
So let’s just look at this for what it is: a marketing trick to get the game to show up for more people.
They all might suffer from the same lack of pro-activeness or simply time to try this as ourselves? Most of these biology games are similar small indie projects.
Well, the advantage of having mostly wrapped-up Microbe Stage is that the changes aren’t that obvious anymore. We might be able to get away with just doing it once, and updating it two years later if we feel like it. A more modern version would then just be another perk of getting the non-demo version.
My only concern would be people that currently just buying the game to try it because it’s cheap instead just getting the demo for that. So it would probably need to have a significant effect on visibility. I am not sure what the market research on this says?
Yeah, that’s a key point. Many players online complain games missing a demo, but most of the time those complaints are against AAA games that cost 60$, where I do see it being pretty nice to be able to verify it is a sensible purchase. The reasoning of players could be quite different for a 5$ game where the financial risk is much smaller as the game is so much cheaper.
Well, yes. For me I am not so concerned with whether players might skip trying Thrive because of the paywall.
I am more so wondering about the value of showing up in places like Free Demos, or whether the “free demo available” labels catch people’s eyes.
Edit: I will say that a cursory through places like https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/ suggests that people generally have negative experiences with keeping up demos for their cheaply priced games.