[Blog] Valve just took away a valuable visibility tool
Blog post by Chris Zukowski (How to Market A Game)
https://howtomarketagame.com/2024/08/21/valve-just-took-away-a-valuable-visibility-tool/
I mean, Valve has a vested interest in keeping game devs active on the Steam forums.
But also, can we stop fucking replacing support forums with Discord servers? Discord isn’t searchable by engines, so when I have an issue and search for “[game name] [issue]” I can’t easily find support topics from others who have had the same issue. All I get is a generic “jOiN ouR dIsCorD SerVer FoR sUppOrT” page instead.
Why do game devs and publishers who exclusively publish to steam use discord? Steam has searchable forums, chat rooms, screen-sharing, and voice chat too. There’s no need for a third party client.
Has anyone actually read the article? It mentions Discord once, in passing.
It’s about how iframes used to promote upcoming games/games by the same publisher aren’t allowed anymore. This has negative implications towards indie devs because upcoming games in particular are less likely to be recommended already and in order to get into the “New and Upcoming” tab, a certain amount of wishlists is required.
Fewer wishlists => fewer recommendations => fewer wishlists
IFrames are still a thing? I’m actually shocked. I thought they were as dead as the marquee tag!
Thank you, for not focusing on my apparently unfortunate choice of an image and reading the post. 🙏 This has serious implications for indie game marketing. The author mentioned at the end that his next blog post is going to be about alternative techniques to cross-promote. I’m very curious what he’ll come up with!
Discord is a piece of shit
Meh, I’m happy to have all external links in one place.
Once the community adapts that is where everyone will look as second nature if they want to check their website, social media, or whatever.
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Can the next step be deprecating Discord entirely? Trash.
It won’t be too long until users get used to the standardized locations for socials. And it cleans up a lot of spam
Except the only socials they support are Discord, YouTube, Facebook, X and Twitch.
Good riddance. Discord sucks.
While the rules regarding external links will be somewhat manageable to work with, Chris rightfully points out that indie developers will have a harder time promoting upcoming games, since they won’t be able to link them on the pages of their already published games. The latter tend to receive a lot more visibility on steam and were a valuable channel to gather wishlists. Welp :/
This feels like engagement bait