Even the most expensive advertising campaigns are nothing without a good rating in Steam reviews. A studio that manages to change a game's rating from “Mixed” to “Very Positive” can triple its chances of sales through a marketing campaign, a new gaming industry report has found.
Game marketing company Gamesite published statistics in its latest compendium on Performance Marketing, as reported by GamesIndustry.biz. Gamesight correlated the conversion rates of 30 premium games with their corresponding Steam review scores, showing that every game with a conversion rate of over 2% had a positive Steam review rating of over 80%.
The report also includes a case study of one unnamed game's 21-month marketing campaign, which compares the campaign's success to its review score at the time. A game tended to see a higher conversion rate when its review score was higher, with the conversion rate peaking at over 7% when the game briefly achieved an “overwhelmingly positive” rating.
Gamesight says it has seen similar patterns in other games it has studied, and has also identified ways studios can improve their review scores. “From both this analysis and our experience working with game developers, we consistently see that things like game patches, bug fixes, and the addition of player-requested features tend to be at the center of these improvements,” said Gamesight data analyst Marley Tandoc. The case study game also follows this trend, with a spike in extremely positive results occurring when the developer added a feature that was highly requested by players.
Overall, the marketing firm concludes that listening to players and incorporating their feedback is just as important to the game's success as the money that goes into marketing it. However, there is one major exception to this trend: Gamesight added that free-to-play games did not have a “measurable impact” based on review scores, as players can simply try out the game without incurring any costs.
This collection has already been followed by several successful games, including such as No Man's Sky And Helldivers 2 both are seeing significant changes in ratings due to the implementation of updates in response to player feedback. Steam also recently changed the way review ratings are displayedrecognizing the large impact that these ratings can have on the success of the game.
