There's a lesson in this image. Somewhere.

Yes, there’s a clear lesson in this image and, of course, it’s about Steam Greenlight. More specific, it’s about the first days of your campaign.

A week and a half ago we pressed ‘Publish’ on our Greenlight admin page. We’re battling for a spot in the store for Unexplored, a roguelike with a couple of USPs. First of all, its use of a new level creation theory: the cyclic dungeon generator (read more about that here). Second: it features some fierce melee combat. And third: the art style, it’s… different. People either love it it or hate it.

Easy to die

Anyway, we had our trailer (instant gameplay, no logos at the beginning!), a cool description with a nice tagline (Easy to play, easy to die), annotated screenshots and even some bullet points. We launched in the last few days of the Steam Summer Sales --half of the know-it-all bloggers says that’s a bad thing, the other half says it’s the perfect moment, so we did a bit of both.

To our surprise, the numbers started to rise. Instantly and rapidly. It was Saturday afternoon and we hadn’t even launched our press release yet.

And the quick rise continued…

Within three days we got to 90% of the way to the top 100. At some point even to 94%, so... We did it! It was just a matter of hours before we reached that top 100 which all but ensures being greenlit. We never imagined being able to achieve this in a matter of days.

Turns out, we weren’t.

It's day 10 and we’re still in Greenlight. We’re still fighting for our place in the store. Today, we dropped to 79%. So, what went wrong?

Simple answer: nothing. We’re still above the curve and hopeful we’ll get through Greenlight, sooner or later. But it is an interesting question why we were unable to rake in those few votes more needed for a top 100 spot.

How it works

Greenlight is an enigma, but based on our own experience and talking to developers who actually managed to get greenlit, this is sorta how it works:

Rock the vote

Of all visitors on a Greenlight page, approximately 40% votes (according to Steam’s own top 50 figures), the others just click away. In our case, over 70% of unique visitors voted. This may have been a factor in the initial quick rise.

Why 70%? Hard to say, but if we’d have to guess, it would be the fact we managed to communicate what the game is about in an instant. People could make up their mind immediately and vote yes or no. (But again, it also could have been everyone was just being happy because of the Steam Summer Sales or… well, you get the picture.)

The fall...

Why did the morale crushing fall from 94% to 79% occur? We were almost there when our 'free traffic' as provided by Steam to every new game in Greenlight, just... ended. It’s as simple as that. You get a certain amount of days in the limelight and we just ran out of time. Now we’re on our own, we have to create our own traffic to the game’s page by releasing new trailers, press releases, blog posts, et cetera.

Blitz!

So, what’s that lesson I talked about at the beginning of the article? It’s this: it’s blitz!

Yes-votes are worth more at the beginning of your campaign than later on. If you manage to combine the traffic Steam provides the first days with your own, you stand a chance of blasting through Greenlight quickly.

So, don't wait with that press release, extra trailer, Facebook-offensive, or whatever you had planned for day 5 or week 2. Do it right at the start. It may increase your chance of a quick road through Greenlight.

Oh, and really, don't waste the first 30 seconds of your trailer on logos.

(By the way: care to vote for our game?)

UPDATE: We just received an e-mail from Steam. The game has been Greenlit (sorry Gamasutra-editor). So, we did it in 10 days. We'll let this sink in and probably post a little sequel to this article soon. Oh, and: YES!