Scarecrow Studio Meets Valve Corporation
Some days in the life of a company become milestones, markers in time that represent a before and after. That was today; today we met Alden Kroll and Jon Pile from Valve Corporation. In this gathering for game developers, we got the chance to learn some valuable information and drop some questions on them.
‘3 Minutes to Midnight’ is going to be our first game and we want to make everything right, so what Scarecrow Studio learned today. We will summarize some of the most important highlights for you:
- Valve reached 18.5 million users this month; What this means for you? More players, more people buying games; It is also true that there’s more and more game developers as well, but the market is still growing with no signs to stop in a short term.
- If you are planning to sell your game worldwide, the most important countries are:
- USA
- China
- Russia
- Brazil
- Germany
- Canada
- France
- United Kingdom
- Poland
- Turkey
- (and some others …)
- Steam is a diverse, so there’s plenty of games as long as they don’t infringe any terms or conditions. You can find all kinds of games from “Dream Daddy” (a dating simulator) to “Undertale” (a game with basic graphics but awesome content and gameplay).
- They also showed that a lot of games achieve the $100.000 sale milestone within a month. Some of them even reach the $1.000.000 milestone.
What are the most important steps (according to Valve) to make your game a success:
- Make a Plan.
- Sign up and put your “Coming Soon” page (you should make translations available in every language, depending on the countries which you are planning to target [only if you have subtitles for it]).
- Find and talk with communities of fans.
- Make a good trailer and get to the point. (This part is really interesting I will probably write a post about it.)
- Show your game to people who are not afraid to hurt your feelings.
Languages, well, you’ve seen all the most active countries on Steam; so try to get your game translated (even if it’s only with subtitles) to as many languages as you can afford, prioritizing the biggest markets. Scarecrow Studio translated ‘3 Minutes to Midnight’ to 15 languages.
Other considerations:
- The resolution; Steam has data about the most common PC configurations and resolutions, so you can plan your game accordingly.
- Input; there is an API which Steam created, that once integrated it makes your game compatible with many controllers (even Logitech ones).
I’ve also attached some pictures so you can check for yourself.
