"Where's the f**king gameplay?!" As im clicking through three different videos that are all cinematics/story/char intros

I learned more about romance novels than I previously thought was possible.

19:12 I always look for UI in screenshots because that typically means the screenshot represents actual gameplay rather than cinematic rendering, cut-scenes, "captured with in-game footage" etc, which doesn't matter compared to actual gameplay.

I'm one of the rare ones and don't ignore the long description. Instead, I skim what I can read, hit the "see more" button or whatever it's called, and immediately regret my decision and hastily scroll through all of that junk to get to the reviews.

Fantastic talk. This describes my steam shopping habits almost to a tee. This is invaluable advice! I do wish as you said more devs would just focus on gameplay within the first 15 to 20 sec.

The part where they check the tags surprises me because I bought over 300 games on steam and I have never checked the tags even once

What comes out of this dude's mouth is pure gold. His other GDC talk is very informative also.

48:45 - "some people are not bundle buyers, like eminem."

This is probably the best Steam research and title for one that I have ever seen. Great video and funny enough: it was recommended via word of mouth.

Amazing how I shop on steam really similarly but from a dev perspective I'd have totally missed most (if not all) of those points. So glad I saw Chris's talks trying to sell games. Now I just need to actually make a game worth selling.

Oh my god, this was SO good, almost everything in this is new information, I have been researching around this and Chris is the one that has actually done a study, with some groundbreaking truths to be honest, just the fact that NO ONE bought games at full price, damn, so many more moments like this in this video, I watched it in one go.

18:25 "Show the UI" How funny is it that the steam developer documentation specifically tells us NOT to include UI and to go to extra effort to disable it when taking screenshots! They are dead wrong! Edit: seems I was wrong about the steam docs, I must have read this advice somewhere else.

THIS is the greatest GDC talk ever

Very interesting talk, i wish the mic was better and that he'd pause the recorded videos instead of talking over them

These are so insightful. I read the article a while back and we completely changed our steam page because of it. Great stuff as always Chris!

Damn, you've thoroughly sold me on the value of your kind of work and process with this. Companies should be taking this hands-on, 'designer-brain', scientific approach to their marketing for sure. Nowadays I think a lot of companies are just following trends or hiring "experts" with large media followings or perceived clout, or even those people saying "the right things" (modern-day puritans). Even Japanese developers now are trying to "market to the west" by going that route and that is _so_ wrong. They should have someone like you to dive into the community unbiased, uncover what makes people like or dislike products and go from there. All in all, fantastic talk.

You described my shopping habits to a T. I found myself exclaiming "YES!" several times during this video lmao

The guy getting frustrated was so funny. Amazing talk!

Heartwarming marketing. No evil stuff lol. Market is to connect, not manipulation or tricks.

Damn, this is one of the most insightful GDC talks yet. It was super useful to record and watch the buyer habits. Really shatters a lot of preconceptions I had too. Show the UI for screenshots and people actually like to compare games on page load. Wow, mind blowers. Also described me super well. I freaking hate cinematic trailers as the first thing that loads. Just show me some gameplay.

19:18 Yeah! If the UI is too complicated, I am not going to relax. 3ds MAX, Maya, Photoshop have enough UI for daily work already!!

I also like to read the negative reviews before filtering specifically for negative reviews. It let's me know sometimes if any recent changes have negatively effected the game.

13:18 Artist here. The answer is human shape and high contrast. Most images are hard to see on steam but the shape is easily identifiable, it makes you want to understand what is going on with the human, the redundant logo that will appear right beside it is not the focus point.

Be true to yourself. Focus in your audience. Show off your game UX. Trust that your audience will show up. Don’t try to appeal to those who aren’t interested in you/your game. Don’t stress negativity w/o context. Ignore negative reviews from outside your audience. The summery reads like basic life lessons :)

This is beautiful. It should be archived in the Library of Congress.

Probably one of the most useful GDC talks ever. I am a pretty sure that studying the behavior of 15 people is not enough to have a full understanding of the whole Steam userbase, but it gives you a good idea of many (and maybe most) gamers shopping there.

Sticking to genres is what everyone is learning. Game dev is going exactly as other mature media has learned: music, novels, and movies. Genres attract, then work the space in new ways.

Great talk. I gotta say, you nailed my own browsing habits to a degree it kind of surprised me. I didn't think I was particularly unique in how I browsed the site but still, you really nailed it.

I read your article about this and was pretty hyped to see the GDC talk uploaded as well :) I can offer you one more data point: I read long descriptions if the game has done a good enough job of hooking me with the other stuff. The long description is important for me to make my final purchasing decision, but not important to get me interested. For reference, I have 366 games on steam (and about 100 across other platforms).

Dude, as User Research obsessed PM, this video is AWESOME! The evaluating preference shapes section at 25:00 honestly made me do a gut check on why my last B2B SaaS startup struggled with PMF. Such a crystal clear mental model. My product was communicated as that amalgamation of shapes and it made it a bridge too far for most buyers. So cool to see people applying these techniques to gaming content. Keep up the good work.

Great video! As a Steam player with more than 200 games (most I havent even played) I will buy your game, or at least put it on wishlist if you: 1) Show me a screenshot/video of the gameplay of the most exciting thing (action) to do in the game 2) Show me a screenshot/video of the gameplay of a casual thing in the game (not a cinematic or trailer, that’s what KZfaq is for like he said) 3) Show me the UI because it communicates the genre (yes) but also the artform, style, and sometimes even the narrative (like how Starcraft 2 has different UIs for different races tells the player they’ll be switching around) 4) Let me discover your game’s new mechanics/features/story as I play it “Substance over signal”

I LOVED this video. As someone who worked on games and as a Marketing specialist and as a heavy steam user this is awesome! Loved it!

Wow this talk is actually amazing. This really gets into how I would browse and search for things I like, and I don't even use steam that much. I use similar things when it comes to... well browsing manga or light novels. To think the same applies to games, I am astonished that haven't clicked yet. This talk is the best marketing talk, that I've ever seen, which applies to not only steam but to so much more.

This video was a mini-wishlist for me lol. Great talk, a lot more personal than date-driven--I guess that's just the nature of qualitative over quantitative research. One thing I'd also recommend to developers is that your game is accessible in controls, graphics, and whatever to a wide audience. I use PCGamingWiki to find out if a game has remapping because that's pivotal to the way I play. I also tend to play more indie games because I have a low spec system so that may be a selling point for you.

This is an amazing presentation! I wish that there was a larger sample size for more accurate stats, but I understand that it would require a lot of manpower.

Very awesome talk! Interesting how it contrasts with the talk on game messaging. There they said in advertising not to mention genre but a more emotional message. Guess I'll just be doing both! haha.

Glossary(?) Intro(?) - 1:56 Part 1 - Methodology and why - 2:27 Part 2 - How to make a steam page that sells - 11:15 Part 3 - Know your Genre: Shoppers like the familiar 24:30 Part 4 - How to manage a steam sale - 32:38 Part 5 - How to turn Wishlisters to Buyers - 44:26 ---- Watch the video. My summary can not do it justice. But here are some key points in my opinion. Make sure your steam thumbnail image/"Capsule Image" attracts the player to hover over it. Have the 4 key images SHOW DIFFERENT ASPECTS OF YOUR GAME - Do not show the same 'kind' of image -- Show the different type of things you can do + some user interface Showing user interface will allow players to quickly relate to the type of game you are selling. Make sure your TAGS properly describe your GENRE/Your type of game. Do not waste tags on something like [indie] - Try not to use [Female Protagonist], People should be able to infer through images. Beware of "Poison pill" tags - Some people do not like [Metroidvania] or [Horror] - and will complete avoid your game -- IF YOUR GAME FITS THESE GENRES, PLEASE DO INCLUDE IT THOUGH! Short Description Players are looking for VERBS - What can YOU DO in this game? They do not care about "the setting or story" here. Long Description RIP - No one looks here, apparently. --- Find your "TRIBE" - Find the players who WANT YOUR TYPE OF GAME - and PROVE TO THEM this is what they want. Use ANCHORS - use things that people are comfortable with, use common tropes in your genre. Then use HOOKS to give them that special something that your game provides over the others. Do not give up after your first game - Use the community you have built from your first game, to help you with the second. If someone has bought your first game and they enjoyed it, there is a good chance they will support you on your second game. Again, Watch the video. My summary can not do it justice. But here are some key points in my opinion. --- ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I'm an avid Steam user who buys lots of games (current library size is 14,600 games), and considering that I'm generally ready to give developers money for interesting games, I thought devs might be interested in my purchasing process. Unfortunately, very little in this talk reflects it - I doubt there were many power users in the sample. I'll highlight some points in case someone's interested. Sorry in advance for the incoming wall of text. - "People skim the short description and ignore the long one": The short description is the first thing I read and if it sounds interesting, my next step is to read the long description. If the short description gives a good impression of an interesting story or interesting mechanics, this is the best way of catching my attention - "The screen shots in the hovers are important": I typically ignore those completely. These are just graphics and even if well-chosen, they don't tell me enough about the story or the mechanics to make a purchase decision. - "Genre is incredibly important": I'm not always in the same mood, so why would I always play games in the same genre? Of course I have preferences (see below), but this only influences my purchase decisions in edge cases. As a frequent Steam customer, I'm also well aware that the tagged genres are often just plain wrong, so I don't pay _too_ much attention to them. - "female protagonist tag is irrelevant for purchases": It definitely increases the chance that I purchase a game or at least take a closer look, albeit slightly. - "Metroidvania tag indicates difficult games and is a poison pill": What? Yes there are difficult metroidvanias, but there are also lots of easy ones. The term simply indicates that this _probably_ a platformer with exploration elements, character growth, and an incentive to backtrack to previous areas and use newly gained abilities to discover previously unreachable places. It says nothing about the difficulty. As someone who likes to explore, this is actually a tag that _has_ a strong positive influence on my purchase decision, though I usually do some research to find out if it _really_ meets the criteria (tags are unreliable, and this one particularly so) - "If they click, they think your game is neat": Not at all. I click on lots of games simply because they have a good price, or because I'm just in the mood to check out the last 100 new games on Steam. I _cannot tell_ just from screenshots or tags whether I'd like a game, so obviously I don't _skip_ games just based on these insufficient criteria. - "People look at the screenshots, not at the trailers": I usually go for the trailer first, because it demonstrates gameplay better than still shots. - "Gamers don't care about story at this point": Gameplay info _is_ important, but story is equally important in my selection process. If a short description starts with e.g. "Immerse yourself in ancient Sumerian culture", that triggers my interest more than "This is a 2.5D action platformer". The first statement sets the game apart from others, which is why I'm interested in this info. The second statement just tells me that this game uses mechanics that 900 other games in my library also use. The one thing that annoys me is if a game description _only_ talks about story, or _only_ about mechanics, and information about the other is hard to find. - "Gamers look whether the Steam page matches their predisposed interest": That's precisely what I don't do. When I look at a game, I try to be _open_ for what the dev is trying to do, because otherwise I would never discover all the amazing things outside of the bubble formed by previous experiences. I sometimes specifically buy games that I don't _expect_ to like much, just because something about it triggered my interest and I want to give them a chance. That's how I discovered Puzzle Quest and Stardew Valley. How would I find such amazing new experiences if I looked only for things that I already knew? - People check Steam's "Is that game relevant to you" section: I never do, I completely ignore that part. Steam is usually pretty bad at predicting what I'd might like, its algorithm has numerous very obvious flaws. - "Friends are important": I don't care what the people on my friend list like. It's a common misconception that people on friend lists are actually friends. People are on my friend list because perhaps they had a question about a game I reviewed last year (and they need to be on my friend list in order to contact me, so they send an invite), or we traded games 2 years ago, or they sent me an invite for whichever unknown reason which I accepted because why not, or for lots of other reasons. I don't know who most of these people are. And those whom I actually _do_ consider friends, they are friends for different reasons than their taste in games, which may be totally different from mine. If you like to eat salad, would you expect your friends to like salad too? I'd also like to highlight some things that _did_ reflect my process: - "People look for negative reviews": I usually also check positive reviews and the Steam forum, but yes, I'm looking for information about the details of a game that I might like or dislike particularly. Customer reviews, _if_ they are specific, are a valuable source of information. - "Power users use third-party sites": Absolutely. Actually you can see Augmented Steam (which adds info directly into Steam pages) being used in one of the clips. That could have been highlighted more since many devs don't seem to know about them, and aren't aware how much data power users actually have available when they make a purchase decision. - "Historical Low" is important: Definitely. If my price tracker shows that your game was 50% off last year, there's no way I buy it at 15% off now, no matter how interesting it might look. - "Social media drives wishlist entries, but not sales": I don't follow social media at all, but if I hear about a game that sounds _really_ interesting, I usually do put it on my wishlist until I can get it at a good price. - "People don't buy at full price": I might occasionally, but I usually don't. It will get cheaper anyway, and I have tons of interesting games still to play until that happens. There's zero need to buy anything "right now". So taking everything into account, this talk reflected my purchasing process rather poorly. Of course it's possible that I'm an exception. In any case, I'm happy to tell anyone interested what's going on in my head when I buy or play games. :)

This was excellent. As someone who is about to lay the foundation for our first steam store page. A lot to think about.

As a person who buys a lot of Indie and AAA titles myself, I never buy a game unless I've seen the gameplay. Often times the only way to do that is to go on KZfaq. It's super cool when a dev actually includes gameplay in the video and images.

Wow. I learned that I am an outlier in terms of buying games. Never abandon my cart, I only put it there if I'm sure I'm going to buy it right then. I only have maybe 5-10 games on my wishlist. Never look past the top 5 tags. Never look at or use curators. Rarely ask friends about games (even though most of them are gamers).

It's uncanny how accurate this was to how I shop on steam. I have over 1k games on my wishlist Somewhat more games than I actually own

INSANELY HELPFUL!!! Thanks for giving such an informative presentation!

For the long info box, I *do* look at the bullet points - they're usually a concise list of primary or secondary features that I'm looking for

31:44 I had no idea that Deus Ex and Fallout: New Vegas were first person shooters... Snarkiness aside, you make some very good points. I don't think that I'll ever make a game, but as a game consumer it was quite interesting. What I found interesting is that people look for games on Steam. For me it's where I go to find additional information after I've found out about a game from another source, mostly KZfaq, or sales on numerous storefronts. If I haven't already, I'd check the game out on KZfaq to see actual gameplay. When I do look at a game on Steam, my process _is_ pretty similar to those that were featured here.

I know that personally as a shopper there is an additional step for me, I read negative review first then some positive and then go google non steam reviews.

This is a must see for every developer out there. So good.

This talk and his previous one are both fascinatingly useful. Some of it I may have noticed and never thought about, but is actually incredibly useful.

Great talk. Saved it so I can watch again and then prolly again.

Finally some quality field research! Thanks for the talk. It is one of the most useful I have seen :)

Shame this only has 5000 views, very interesting from a buyer's perspective.

It's pretty much the exact thing I do when browsing games 1) Look at the banner (this eliminates 90% of games) 2) If it like the banner hover the mouse (only 20% of the remaining get past this part) 3) If it still like what I see click on it 4) Look at the art 5) Try to find gameplay screenshots 6) Look at tags 7) Decide if it's a genre I like 8) Look at negative reviews 9) Watch a gameplay on youtube 10) Add to wishlist 11) Wait for sale 11b) If I want it now, go to "IsThereAnyDeal" and buy it wherever it's the cheapest (excluding G2A and other shady stores). 12)Buy. The alternative is having a friend/s ask me to buy a game to play it with him/them. A game I would have never bought it on my own.

Damn one of the most important talks.

20min in and this is incredibly informative..

Hey love your talk super informative. Espiacaly the screen share and stories. My only critic of your analysis would be that you did start taking the numbers you drew from those surveys and analysed them in the way you would a quantitive Study. That doesn't make sense to me. If you want to look at raw numbers it would make more sense to me to get some big number's on actual conversion rates and so on from some other resource and combine those with your quality stories. To look at numbers that the way you did in the collums only makes sense to me with a big sample size. Combine forces to make a in depth analysis. Congrats again on your talk taught me a lot and other people too looking on the conversion rate of watched to commented ;)

I'm surprised many of the things mentioned here aren't obvious. When I browse for games, and look at screenshots, the first thing I look for are those with UIs as they give context to how the game is played. It always had me perplexed that those screenshots are so difficult to find, when they're like the first thing to be seen.

Excellent, constructive and insightful talk. Learnt loads! Thanks

Outstanding! Thank you Chris!

Awesome talk! Super useful, super clear, and it made a lot of sense.

Liked before watched, just because previous talk was so awesome i've believed i can put price tag on my game.

For some reason I half expected there to be a "*ding*, always have a call to action". ;-) (I am referring to a previous talk) Jokes aside though, it was a very good talk!

A fantastic lecture. Thank you very much!

Oh god, all these habits are exactly how I shop as well. I felt self conscious when her pointed things out as well. Thanks for the great talk.

the best study ever. very insightful.

What a gem of a talk absolutely excellente

So passionate guy! Great talk, thank you!

oh i'll share something, i bought ninjin clash of carrots cause it went on sale not long after release and i respected it. edit: also i don't know what they call their game but i call it a beat em up/shoot em up hybrid.

Thank you Chris for your research/work. Good job man. Cheers from Germany

Oh haha I read the article on this and now randomly stumbled into a video

This talk is so jam packed with stuff

This is a very useful window into the sort of purchase patterns people actually follow. It’s limited by being small-sample and largely qualitative data, but you’re not getting any meaningful quantitative sample unless Valve gets much more collaborative about these things. Devs aren’t even expecting this for free; if Steam were to provide a large de-identified and anonymised yearly sample pool it would only cost them a few thousand dollars or researcher time and any studio with enough staff to justify time spent on market analysis would pay a pretty decent sum for it. You could even offer it at a scaling price to encourage indie games. I don’t understand why they don’t do this. The only remotely-sane reason I can think of is they don’t want patterns of users to come out at all and there’s no reason they would want that that isn’t a bad conspiracy. Weird.

This man gets it. He gets it! Everything he said I've experienced. I also think the Steam UI is ugly and needs a facelift. All the information is too small and cluttered. And is it really beneficial that I have to scroll to the middle of a store page to add a game to a cart? Valve is fat, content and extraordinarily lazy. That's a monopoly for you.

Love how ya brought up sample size as when ya 1st mentioned 15 I thought/wondered about it! =)

Since this presentation taught me that shoppers read negative reviews to see if that reviewer hates things for the same reasons as them, let me say that I didn't like this video because it was too on-point.

Great content, with good examples and real customer videos!

64% abandonment means 36% goes through, and the 11% recovery are on that big 64% chunk, not your measly sales, so 11% of 64 is 7%, which you can add on top of the 34%, that's not an 11% boost, it’s an extra 20% If the abandonment was 99, those 11% would multiply your sales by 12

This guy got great energy, really started laughing when he got to the romance novels

Great presentation. Lot to take away from. :) I can attest to that user behaviour as it reflects mine as well.

his talks are always really good

Just wow! Thanks a lot for this Its kinda obvious once you really think about it since this is pretty much the same way i go shopping on steam. Whelp, Now i just need to restructure my steam pages a bit :D

Boom! Home Run! Great talk

The insights about tags are accurate. I literally ignore horror and zombie tag. I dont need more gross stuff in my life.

Dude, totally on point. Great info so glad you shared it

I wish I could have liked this video twice

I would like to add a thing that you didn't mentioned is that is very personal to me but it also affects a bunch of people: Almost all developers on Steam are losing money as of today as they do not offer compatibility between Mac/Windows/Linux. I used to have Windows, transitioned to a Mac about 10 years ago. I have a library of 237 games on Steam, in which 62 of them run on Mac OS. Of those 62, I currently only play the same six, and as you mentioned, they're all on the same genre or sub genres of Strategy/RTS. Steam Survey doesn't lie, Windows represents 95% of all players on the platform, with Mac being about 4% and Linux less than 1%. Indeed it makes way more sense to develop games for Windows, but if you go at any time at the "Whats being played" tab, the majority of games have compatibility of platforms. If you go on the "Top Seller", about 1/3 have compatibility. I could relate to everything on this video, except for the wishlist thing. As a Mac OS user, as soon as I see something of my interest and that it runs on Mac, there's no wishlist, it goes straight into the cart and boom, sold. And I'm pretty sure that others on the 5% range can also relate to this. I totally understand if someone replies and say that developing for mac isn't profitable or not worth it for the common developer. But if you're into making money, well just for the sake of it, those 5% translate into 1.150.000 people that could be buying more games if they could. (5% of the total 23million active accounts as of March/2020).

I agree with all of this

Holy.... This was a great video

Such a useful vid!

Cool talk. For the point about buying games on sale, I would have to see some quantitative data before making any conclusions. Clearly some people buy at full price, and you would need to sell 10 copies at 90% off to make the same as you would for a single copy sold at full price.

26:29 who knew the google voice was a steam user!

Trailers/screenshots on the store page not showing gameplay has got to be one of my biggest annoyances. I’m not going to YT to look up a let’s play of your game just to see how it plays

GREAT TALK :) This is how i shop - Is there a hidden camera in my room? ;)

Super fantastic talk! Just a tiny thing that is confusing me a little bit, the UI: to hide or to show?

One of the interesting things he did not talk about but something I am interested in is what about pc based free to play games, for there is no cost to entry so I wonder precisely how and where it makes a difference.

Great talk, thank you!

Phenomenal tips! Thank you!

I think that player without many games usually don't forget what they wishlistd. Sales are probably a little less important, but not that much.

I'm at 0:44 and I'm like: "GIFs. People wanna see GIFs." Edit: I used to always skip the long description sections, but I almost always stop to check out an animated GIF. It's a great way to show the gameplay associated with the game's bullet pointed features.

So, what I've learned from this talk is that I'm very much not anything like the people he studied in terms of how I buy a game

I'm not sure that the take away on the sales wishlist familiarity is the way it should be taken. If he has a game in his wishlist, he knows it's always on sale, and it's 90% off. What is he waiting for to buy it? How can you convert that familiarity into a call to action?