Beware with your steam keys - Do you tag your steam keys ?

Hey guys,

Just tough there might be interest here, about why you should tag your steam keys.

http://camel101.com/wp/2017/08/10/bundles-steam-key-tagging/

 

It sounds more like the issue here was that they made the amateur mistake of not going with more trusted bundle sites. Also making bundles their primary strategy for sales instead of doing any promotion at all. Bundles only make sense once your game sales have slowed to the point where a high-profile bundle will help you out. This means places like Humble Bundle, but not... well... pretty much anywhere else.

But 10 cents is alright. Yeah, okay.

 

200 games a week coming out, pretty much hell on steam right now. Someone should make a thread about how badly steam direct is going.

 

The blog misses a few points.

Why is accidentally selling a bundle outside of the contract period a bad thing? I guess it's inconvenient to have sales when you expected none. But it's still sales.

Considering the sales per day were so low to begin with, it really seems like bundles were the best revenue option.

 

As an afterthought maybe, but honestly, I can't find ANY actual promotional information about this game. No press releases, only a single pretty damning review, basically nothing about this game at all. They seemed to be relying entirely on Greenlight to do their marketing, which is a Bad Idea to put it mildly. They experienced low sales because they expected that getting in on as many bundles as possible would help them, but most experienced devs who have dealt with bundles specifically advise against this because bundles are

1. Rife with scammers
2. Not exactly good revenue
3. Only worth it once you've fallen below a sales threshold
4. Not a substitute for actual marketing and promotion

 

https://forum.unity3d.com/threads/steam-strategy-now-that-greenlight-is-gone.487615/#post-3179698

& Indiegala - but not pretty much anywhere else.

 

If you did read the post, you would have noticed the game was from 2010, and was already an old game.
The idea was exactly to go directly to bundles.

 

The problem was that even if it was an accident, we would never know about those sales if we did not tag the keys.

 

You were entrusting sales to someone who you didn't trust to pay you for sales they made?

 

trust is relative in this business, do you trust 100% to any site, distributor,publisher with who you make business with ?

 

And? They still never promoted the game.

 

You go and try to promote a 7 year old game, and let me know how that goes

 

Probably a lot goddamn better than never promoting it at all.

 

You are completely missing the point of the article.....

 

The article is pointless because they made a bunch of amateur mistakes on the second release of their game. It has nothing to do with key tagging and everything to do with them completely botching the entire thing. Key tagging shows who the people ripping them off were, when in reality you should assume the vast majority of bundle sites will rip you off because the vast majority of bundle sites are scams.

 

First of all, we did try to promote the game on the second release, but the market is so saturated that no one cares about a 2010 game. Assuming what other people did or did not do is amateurish on your part.
And if you did try to promote a 7 year old game, please go ahead and share with me your results.
And second, the point of the article is about key tagging, to warn other developers.
Not everyone is like you, smart and pro and tags their keys, that's why the article was written, because we did talk with other developers on that bundle site, and no one was tagging their keys.
I'm sorry if the article is bad, amateurish to you, but it may be useful to someone else.

 

Thanks for pointing this out. I didn't even know keys could be tagged. So - the article was helpful.

This point is disputable so I'll just provide an example. Another World was re-released a couple years ago on steam, and from reading it did well.
Love that game.

 

Wow 200 games a week released on steam right now . Well I am going to go drunk this weekend rather then working on my game all weekend

 

Cheers brother! Congrats on the new yob.