Make your first Steam game a game jam game

If you have never released a game on Steam before, make your first one a game jam game.

It gives you the discipline of finishing a product, and it is one of the cheapest ways to learn how Steam works. Do not ship the raw jam build, obviously. Take the prototype that came out of the jam, polish it for 2-3 weeks, then release it. You get this experience for $100 with no money worries attached, and you get that back if the game reaches $1000 in revenue, but assume you never will.

You will run into learning where to put builds, setting up depots, page layouts and localisation, wishlist/sale/discount dynamics, review processes, key distribution, beta branches, tax forms and a pile of other new things I cannot list here. None of it is hard, but at first it feels foreign and frightening. Exposing yourself to it is the best way to learn, and it seriously lowers your margin of error on the games you make later.

Also open the page weeks before release and try collecting wishlists, even on a small scale. The real thing you learn here is the funnel itself. How many people see the page, how many of them wishlist it, how many turn into sales at launch. You set up a depot once and you are done with it, but a feel for conversion only settles in after you have seen your own numbers.

Here is the real point: if you learn most of these on launch day, you cannot take them back. If you priced it too low you cannot raise it. If your tags are wrong the algorithm puts you in the wrong place, and even if you fix them later the old tag metadata does not get wiped. You also learn to deal with the reviews your first build gets, and with the people who swear at 7 generations of your family. That is the real value of a jam game: it is a sacrificial product where you burn the mistakes you cannot undo.

For the people who say “a small, bad game will sit on my developer page forever”, the thing that causes trouble on your page is not a small game, it is an abandoned one or one that does not keep its promise. A small game, honestly priced and finished, bothers nobody. And you can delist it if you have to.

Hitting this wall with a 3 week game makes far more sense than hitting it with a year long project. The mistakes and the lessons are the same, only the cost is lower.

I released my own first Steam game this way and it really showed me what I needed to care about. My later games launched much better, because on the second game the page goes up in a day, you are not dealing with chores like tax forms, and your pricing reflex has settled.