SEO on game platforms: why don't we talk about it?

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[The GameDiscoverCo game discovery newsletter is written by ‘how people find your game’ expert & company founder Simon Carless, and is a regular look at how people discover and buy video games in the 2020s.]

G’day, hello, and welcome to our second GameDiscoverCo newsletter of the week. (Don’t worry, we won’t be upset if you wait ‘til you get back from GDC to read it. And heck, did you finish your GDC bingo card yet?)

Anyhow, today’s newsletter deals with something we don’t see talked about much. Sure, SEO (search engine optimization) is a whole, often ‘Google x webpage’-centric profession. But PC and console game platforms have their own UIs and search algorithms. How do you improve your ranking there? Let’s explore…

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SEO on game platforms: why so underdiscussed?

Let’s start this off right: search engines within PC and console platforms - whether it be Steam, which we’ll mainly focus on, the Switch eShop, the Xbox and PlayStation stores - are used many millions of times a week to find games.

But we’d like to note: the majority of the time, people searching on these stores are typing in the name of a particular game. Looking for Lethal Company? Type in Lethal Company, first result is… Lethal Company. Job done.

In fact, when games consistently sell well on stores that are bad for discoverability, like the Switch eShop, it’s often because people saw the game on YouTube or Twitch, and typed in its name. That’s a discovery ‘win’, but nothing to do with store SEO. Yet.. store SEO is still important, folks! (And underdiscussed.)

So we pondered, and also enlisted the help of Steve Stopps and James Clements from Excalibur Games, clients who have two SEO-friendly Steam games (Ranch Simulator & Flashing Lights). So here’s some tangible takeaways for Steam in-store SEO:

• The right search keywords are vital: Steam ranks your game in its Search Suggestion results (which pop up when you start typing) and its full search results. Some of this ranking is based on sales popularity (we believe!) But if your game doesn’t include that keyword anywhere in the first place, it won’t show at all.

• There’s multiple places you can include keywords: you can put them in Search keywords in Steam’s Store Admin page or simply weave them throughout your description. (Maybe you want to put ‘coaster’ and ‘roller coaster’ in addition to ‘rollercoaster’, if your game is a theme park sim, for example.)

• Game naming helps, but platforms may edit over-keyworded titles: title matches rank highest, and some devs use keywords in their title to improve SEO - Ambulance Life: A Paramedic Simulator is one more modest example. But Steam will also manually change SEO-y titles if they feel like they’re deliberately extraneous.

Yes, these are the basics, and there’s s a lot more detail. For example, you should look carefully at what happens when people gradually type in a keyword on Steam’s search autocomplete. (The games change for each character added.)

An interesting metapoint here: "Which more ‘abstract’ keywords are people searching for that they might find your game? If nothing, you won’t get much upside!" So: is search a real discovery mechanism that could help someone find your game for the first time?

It works for search results like ‘truck driving game’ - broader themes that casual players might be exploring. More people should consider making ‘on-platform SEO-friendly’ games? (See: Supermarket Simulator, currently #1 for ‘simulator’ on Steam.)

And in asking Excalibur’s Steve Stopps on this subject, he came up with the following extra comments. His meta-point: “The question all developers should be asking is:
what visibility is available, and how do I get seen there?” He adds:

• Steam provides much better data than the mobile platforms on where your traffic is coming from:“Make friends with the Store & Platform Traffic Breakdown Page. Understand where the different sources of traffic are coming from, and which ones you can influences with Tags, Keywords and your Game Name (these are your three primary levers).” (Mobile has a lot of how-to guides you can extrapolate from, btw.)

• ‘Impressions are vanity, visits are sanity’:“It is relatively easy to make your impression numbers go up for areas like Search Suggestion & Direct Search. But if people aren’t visiting your page, they can’t wishlist/buy your game. [This might be because] your key art needs work, or you are not appearing to relevant/interested players.”

• Careful and measured iteration is key: Steve says “my loop is to make a change, watch the data for a few days, then tweak the assets or the SEO, then wait again. If the numbers go up, I am happy - if not, I change. I am doing this on a weekly basis on all of our games to ensure they are maximising their visibility.”

To some extent, this search results optimization only works if you have a game that is at least ‘medium popular’ in the first place. (If you don’t have that, you’re fighting hard to even appear a long way down an even longer list, unless your title 100% matches the search.)

But if you do have interest, you can get some good boosts, especially when people are looking for ‘a type of game’, rather than a specific title. Finding ‘games that appeal to a similar audience’ and deconstructing their tags and keywords is vital. (We have some Steam client tools for ‘affinity’ which we’re looking to roll out wider, later this year.)

Finally, we’ve concentrated this article almost entirely on Steam, but similar rules apply to console UI search, too. For example, on Xbox, it looks like some devs are using Zelda as behind-the-scenes search keywords. That’s clearly for a reason. (Ping us if you have tips on console SEO that don’t get the console makers mad at us?)

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The state of the game biz: UGC, retention & more

Timed for the start of GDC, game engine & monetization services behemoth Unity has released its ‘2024 gaming report’(free reg. req!), talking all kinds of hot trends (like AI, which we’re casually stepping over for now), as well as other game biz evolutions.

The survey and its results are somewhat aimed towards mobile games, which are where Unity monetizes on the ads side (and a large chunk of the overall game market.) But trying to extract the relevant parts for PC/console noobs like us:

• Social (and competitive!) play is getting bigger for GaaS: the above graph, asking devs how you retain players, is heavy on ‘Daily Rewards/Missions’ (67%) and ‘Achievements And Challenges’ (59%), but ‘Leaderboards’ (33%) and ‘Player vs Player’ content (31%) is also pretty high up. (Clans and co-op have fueled games like Monopoly Go!, after all?)

• Studios of all sizes are shipping to more platforms: per Unity: “Between 2021 and 2023, multiplatform games have grown 40% proportionally. While studios with limited resources largely stuck to single-platform release strategies in 2022, they’ve built 71% more multiplatform games over the past two years.”

• User-generated content is increasingly part of the roadmap:“Studios are looking to extend the lifespans of their game IPs by deepening audience attachment… 27% of the developers we polled report incorporating user-generated content (UGC) into their games to invite greater engagement.”

Another notable tidbit in favor of user-generated that we picked out, chosen by Unity from a 2023 Harris poll: “52% of U.S. gamers say that the ability to generate content gets them to play longer, while 34% would make content. 31% say they would spend more money on downloadable content on a game with UGC.” Interesting.

We recommend checking out the full survey - hosted on an incredibly long webpage, rather than the customary .PDF, but we are trying to be OK with it - if you’d like more on production bottlenecks and toolsets. (And plenty about AI, of course!)

The game platform & discovery news round-up…

Finishing up the free newsletters for this busy GDC week, let’s take a final look at some of the platform & discovery news that’s ongoing:

• We got asked how Balatro is doing compared to other new games released on Steam in 2024 - and here’s our estimates(above), sorted by most downloads. (Reminder: GameDiscoverCo Plus subscribers can query this data in real-time.)

• Xbox/PC Game Pass is trucking on, and its latest set of announcements are pretty pretty good: Diablo IV, The Quarry, Ark: Survival Ascended, and Terra Invicta for PC players. (Lots of ‘release first, then Game Pass later’ bigger games this time.)

• GDC announcement microlinks: Roblox “introduces AI-powered avatar and texturing technologies to accelerate 3D creation”; Playtron is building “a lightweight OS that replaces Windows or SteamOS on your existing handheld gaming PC”; VR store Viveport by HTC “announces industry-leading 90% revenue share for developers”.

• Summer Game Fest 2024 has been confirmed for June 7th, with “thousands of in-person fans” at the YouTube Theater in LA, and “SGF Play Days, an invite-only media and influencer event in downtown Los Angeles will return on June 8-10, produced by iam8bit.” Nothing 100% E3-like here, then - wonder how IGN Live (3 days, public, ‘early June’ in LA) is progressing?

• Steam has made a major change to its family sharing plans, announcing Steam Families - which replaces Steam Family Sharing & Steam Family View, “giving you a single location to manage which games your family can access and when they can play.” Remember, cheating-related bans affect the entire account - here’s a good joke about that. (There’s also a 1 year wait for joining new Families, to stop ‘piracy lite’.)

• Mobile game microlinks: here’s what happened with ‘match’ and ‘merge’ (and idle!) games on mobile in 2023; Matej Lancaric looks at Duolingo’s TikTok approach and how it could work for mobile games; Japan accounted for nearly 50% of the revenue from geolocation-based mobile games in 2023.

• European game sales for Feb. 2024, per GSD, were intriguing - down just 0.1% YoY, and Helldivers 2 sales “are only tracking 5% behind” Sony’s last big hit Spider-Man 2 - though HD2 had a PC SKU too. However: “Skull and Bones' launch sales are 30% lower than Sea of Thieves' launch… Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth launch is 23% lower than its predecessor (but 4% higher than Final Fantasy 16).”

• Where’s Apple’s Vision Pro going? Former Meta Quest boss Hugo Barra has a giant overview of the device touching on games (“Apple’s anti-VR stance is a risky move because it negates most of the traditional immersive content that has made the VR medium popular until now.”) ‘Smart person’ Benedict Evans also has a worthy take.

• Previous leaks on a ‘PlayStation 5 Pro’ have been ‘reportedly’ confirmed: “still tentatively targeting a 2024 holiday release… targeting improved and consistent FPS at 4K resolution, a new ‘performance mode’ for 8K resolution, and accelerated ray tracing.” Oh, and Digital Foundry backs up the report and goes into a lot more detail.

• VC David Kaye looks at the seven paths to power, if you’re a game dev or platform, including ‘cornered resource’ (the Half-Life IP meant consumers had to install Steam to check it out!), and counter-positioning (“it’s plausible to argue that the creation of Palworld is a form of counter-positioning on the part of its developer.”)

• Microlinks: Minecraft is adding a cheaper ‘Marketplace Pass’ which is the game content in its Realms Plus sub, minus the server access; ex-head of gaming at YouTube, Leo Olebe has turned up at Xbox as VP of Global Partnerships; Denuvo has announced Tracemark for Games, “a new tool that will let game developers tack down leaks back to the original source.”

Finally, have you heard about Is Super Mario Maker Beaten Yet? Basically, in order to create public Super Mario Maker levels on Wii U, the creator had to play through it, to prove they could be beaten. But that doesn’t mean that everyone else could beat it…

And there’s now a race against time: can the community beat every single level ever created in SMM 1, before the Wii U servers shut down on April 8th? There’s just one to go (!), and YouTuber Grand POOBear explains. (UPDATE: here’s more on that level.)

[We’re GameDiscoverCo, an agency based around one simple issue: how do players find, buy and enjoy your PC or console game? We run the newsletter you’re reading, and provide consulting services for publishers, funds, and other smart game industry folks.]