@Kelly @gamedev Chris went through the numbers in this blog post and the one before and apparently, yeah.
https://howtomarketagame.com/2024/08/21/valve-just-took-away-a-valuable-visibility-tool/
According to one developer quoted in that post, about 75% of trackable wishlists of their sequel were achieved through crosspromotion from the first game's page.

[–] Kelly@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago

In both Adam Coster quotes he is very careful to state that the stats he presents are relative to the trackable traffic. I wonder how the numbers for trackable vs untrackable breakdown.

[–] sukhmel@programming.dev 1 points 2 months ago

So maybe one day our ugly Steam pages will be looked back on nostalgically.

I think, an important part of why this could happen is that it will be voluntary, while noisy ads are not opt-in. They usually are not even opt-out :(

[–] savvywolf@pawb.social 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

So I got a bit curious and looked into this. The 75% figure is coming from the dev of a game called Crashlands who are releasing a sequel sometime this year. They do have a website, located at https://www.crashlands.net/ which... Doesn't make any mention of a sequel being announced. Likewise they have a game specific blog which also doesn't make any mention of it ( https://www.bscotch.net/blog/crashlands ). I think that's where they're missing out on marketing the most - their site should really show the trailer for the sequel.

To their credit though, they have made a "call to action" to wishlist post on Crashland's news page ( https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/391730 ) which I think is where most people learn about game updates and changes. Their Twitter also has a pinned link to the sequel (although it is not a tracked link, so they can't measure metrics through it).

And then there's also the elephant in the room; lost sales... People who were going to buy the game will see the sequel announcement on the page. They might decide to just skip the original game and wait a few months for the sequel and wishlist it so that they can be reminded.

[–] Kelly@lemmy.world 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

To be fair to the dev the crashlands.net footer has an "our games" link to https://www.bscotch.net/games/

This page shows their full catalog including upcoming games. From there is a short link to their crashlands 2 page which encourages a wish listing on steam.

Personally as a consumer that's ideal, if I'm curious about their other games they have a centralized list, if I'm not interested then I can move on with my life.

For a steam centric take on this flow we can consider that every butterscotch shenanigans title has a developer link to this page https://store.steampowered.com/developer/bscotch , from there people can see the titles the developer chooses to feature and explore the rest of their catalog.

Every steam dev gets the same link, its a nice standardized way of exploring their work without spamming up their other product pages.