[Blog] Valve just took away a valuable visibility tool
Blog post by Chris Zukowski (How to Market A Game)
https://howtomarketagame.com/2024/08/21/valve-just-took-away-a-valuable-visibility-tool/
Why do game devs and publishers who exclusively publish to steam use discord? Steam has searchable forums, chat rooms, screen-sharing, and voice chat too. There’s no need for a third party client.
It won’t be too long until users get used to the standardized locations for socials. And it cleans up a lot of spam
Except the only socials they support are Discord, YouTube, Facebook, X and Twitch.
That is a bit lacking, we will have to see what they come up with. And otherwise your users might just have to read what you have to say in the description
I suppose valve could just put a “link your own games” section in there. But abuse of just that was part of the problem :/
Discord is a piece of shit
A valid opinion, but it’s still a widely used community-building tool and relevant to this discussion. The author added this screenshot to the blog post as an example of devs cleverly circumventing the new store page description rules.
Has anyone actually read the article? It mentions Discord once, in passing.
It’s about how iframes used to promote upcoming games/games by the same publisher aren’t allowed anymore. This has negative implications towards indie devs because upcoming games in particular are less likely to be recommended already and in order to get into the “New and Upcoming” tab, a certain amount of wishlists is required.
Fewer wishlists => fewer recommendations => fewer wishlists
Thank you, for not focusing on my apparently unfortunate choice of an image and reading the post. 🙏 This has serious implications for indie game marketing. The author mentioned at the end that his next blog post is going to be about alternative techniques to cross-promote. I’m very curious what he’ll come up with!
IFrames are still a thing? I’m actually shocked. I thought they were as dead as the marquee tag!
I mean, Valve has a vested interest in keeping game devs active on the Steam forums.
But also, can we stop fucking replacing support forums with Discord servers? Discord isn’t searchable by engines, so when I have an issue and search for “[game name] [issue]” I can’t easily find support topics from others who have had the same issue. All I get is a generic “jOiN ouR dIsCorD SerVer FoR sUppOrT” page instead.
Meh, I’m happy to have all external links in one place.
Once the community adapts that is where everyone will look as second nature if they want to check their website, social media, or whatever.
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Can the next step be deprecating Discord entirely? Trash.
This feels like engagement bait
Good riddance. Discord sucks.
While the rules regarding external links will be somewhat manageable to work with, Chris rightfully points out that indie developers will have a harder time promoting upcoming games, since they won’t be able to link them on the pages of their already published games. The latter tend to receive a lot more visibility on steam and were a valuable channel to gather wishlists. Welp :/
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I don’t think this is a problem.
Channels to get visibility exist.
People can mostly choose what kind of news they want to subscribe to and where. They will seek these things out or they will mute them, respectively.
If people want to join the community, finding the discord server is not an actual issue in practice. You can very much still put a link into the game or the demo.
I’m certainly not subscribing to a channel on a 3rd party program to get spammed with marketing every 2 weeks.
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