Your Steam page is not a description, it is an offer

The hardest part of writing my own store pages was not describing the game. You have a piece of work you are proud of and you want to show all of it, and after a while the page turns into a bullet by bullet summary document of the game. But the player does not come to that page to read, they come to make a decision, and the decision they make is not about what the game is, it is about what the game offers them.

There are a lot of developers who say “I wrote everything on the page, anyone who doesn’t understand it isn’t my player anyway”. But the player is not walking away because they did not understand, they are walking away because they could not decide.

There is a formulated version of this. The value equation in 100M Offers by Alex Hormozi, who I never get tired of listening to and who most people on social media are familiar with in some form, brings it down to four variables. He has nothing to do with games, but I think he is at the peak of economics and traditional marketing and what he says can be adapted to almost any industry. Games, though, resemble almost none of them, so this equation does not come over here as it is.

The first variable is the dream, what the player imagines themselves doing in that game. I have written about this before, the player does not buy to see a new system, they buy to see themselves inside that game. That is the page’s first job, getting that sentence to form in the player’s head.

The second variable is believability. It is the player’s answer to “is this game really going to give me what it promises”. Steam answers that question on your behalf. Your review percentage, your review count, whether or not you have a demo, whether you have shipped a game before, even the sentences in the negative reviews. That is where the player works out how much of the promise they see on the page to believe.

This is the part a lot of people miss in particular. They try to make the page prettier, but the more they grow the promise the lower their believability goes, because a growing promise needs more proof. Promising everything in the trailer and then not putting the promised systems in the demo is one example of this mistake.

The third variable is time delay, the time until the fun starts. For the player it starts running after the purchase, download size, boot up, the tutorial and when the first real moment arrives. Steam’s refund rule sits right here, any game played under 2 hours and bought within 14 days can be refunded. That is why your first two hours are as much a part of the offer the game makes as they are a design decision.

The fourth variable is effort and sacrifice. Money is not the only thing the player pays you, there are systems they have to learn, there is time they have to set aside, there is the obligation to find a community, there are the system requirements, there is the frustration they will take on to keep from dropping the game. Of those, only the price and the system requirements are written on the page, the rest they learn after they open the game. If you do not close that gap on the page, the player closes it with a refund.

In the end the equation comes down to this

Dream × Believability

────────────────

Time delay × Effort and sacrifice

Value goes up as the dream and believability grow, or as time delay and effort shrink. So there are two separate ways to strengthen your offer, and almost every developer works only on the top of it, growing the promise, inflating the trailer. The two variables at the bottom are entirely in your hands. To grow the promise you have to make new content, to shorten the time delay you only have to make a decision.

That is why the demo works, for example. It touches three variables at once, it proves the promise is true, it takes the player’s time delay to almost zero and it removes the cost of buying as well.

But the most important distinction you have to watch is this, the equation applies only to the purchase decision, not to the game itself. Hormozi says reduce effort, but that holds for selling products in other industries, and in games the difficulty is often the product itself. If you are making a soulslike, for instance, lowering the effort breaks the game. What you need to reduce is not the game’s difficulty, it is the uncertainty the player carries while taking that difficulty on. And what you need to grow is the satisfaction they get in return for it.

When difficulty and the purchase decision get mixed up, this is what comes out, the developer makes the game look easy on the page, the player thinks it is easy and buys it, then writes a bad review when they find it hard. The wrong offer brings the wrong player, and that player both refunds and drags the score down.

Let me give an example. Think of a systems heavy game that asks you to think but that has arcade, highly playable mini games inside it. You show only the arcade part in the trailer, because it looks fun moment to moment. But the player who sees that and comes in hits Alt+F4 the moment the systems open up. So if you take the methods or the ideas from traditional and digital marketing as they are, you are doomed to fail at game marketing.

The first sentence of Metal Thunder’s store text is this, shoot the rebels, upgrade your arsenal, survive the endless chaos. Three verbs one after the other. I did not write it deliberately, it came out that way naturally while I was trying to describe the game, because that was what you did in the game. I noticed later that the sentence does not describe the game, it tells the player what they will do. So that sentence was not a marketing decision, it was the result of knowing the game.

On my own pages the changes that worked best were always the ones that touched one of these four headings, not the ones where I tried to write the page better. Because the page is not an essay competition, it is clear answers to the four questions the player needs in order to picture it in their head.

So what do you do? Open your page and ask these questions one by one.

One, what does the player see themselves doing on this page. If you cannot answer in a single sentence, you have already failed at the first one.

Two, what proof is there on the page that this game will keep its promise. A demo, reviews, a previous game you shipped, a video where the gameplay runs uncut. If there is none of it, shrink your promise, because a big promise with no proof lowers believability.

Three, how many minutes after buying does the player get the thing you promised. If that time goes over two hours you are up against the refund rule, and that time actually starts right after the purchase.

Four, is the price the only thing the player will pay, or are there other things they have to learn and put up with. If there are, do not hide them on the page, write them down instead, because a player who comes in knowing does not complain and can sometimes even make it part of the appeal, especially in genres like soulslike and rage-game.

If your page’s job were to describe your game, the game that described itself best would sell the most. If wishlists are not coming, the problem is not that you did not write your page well enough, it is that you never decided what you are offering the player.