Why you should pursue the Steam Awards and how it starts with Community

Conceived back in 2016, the Steam Awards has remained a somewhat noteworthy event on any PC gamer’s year-end calendar. Often perceived as just a means to grow your Steam trading cards selection and collect more badges, this is a strong opportunity for any indie game developer to gain recognition and compound on any marketing efforts to get more eyeballs on your title. With one of our long term clients; Ready or Not recently becoming finalists for the “Better with Friends” award, we unpack the value here and share some pointers on how they achieved this.

Isn’t it just a popularity contest?

As with the other arms of your marketing plan, this is not going to magically flood your game on every steam user’s wishlist, but it can still have a powerful compounding effect on top of your game’s marketability by putting your studio up alongside other prominent or well-known studios or publishers. This recognition, of course, expands your presence on Steam and links directly to your store page for any visitors curious about your title and exposes your game to any other engaged community members of other award finalists and winners.

Especially if your social, marketing, and community efforts are already on fire in helping expand your digital footprint. This will serve as yet another strong touch point that will convert any already curious potential leads and position them with further credibility.

The Importance of Community

So now that you’ve decided to take the Steam Awards more seriously and put some resources into getting your title nominated and potentially becoming a finalist or winning a Steam Award. We cannot stress any harder the importance of the big three C’s: Community, community, and community. This is no better illustrated than with our client Ready or Not by VOID Interactive, whose community we helped build, consolidate and drive engagement for. It stands today as an incredibly active and thriving community over multiple platforms be it Discord, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Steam itself.

With their Discord alone almost doubling in size from March 2022 when we started working together to having roughly 160k unique readers of their newsletters on Steam—an engaged community like this is key in activating to help push your game in the Steam awards. While it may be relevant for a future blog on how we helped achieve this, for now, we will focus on a community’s utility and leveraging it to attain a steam award. 

How you can also Mobilize your Community

Whilst some games end up winning due to sheer popularity – the other option is to mobilize your community for whichever award you feel you have the best chance of winning and announce this over your social platforms and on your Discord server. However, for Ready or Not, it was important to recognize the ever-changing sentiment of the community around things such as requested features, bug awareness, update feedback, and more. The developers did an incredible job in communicating all the above and helping them with this certainly helped prime the playerbase.

We made sure to announce the “Better with Friends” award on an upswing in community mood and adding a footnote to other announcements and, most importantly, after their popular “Adam Update”, which proved to be a major success. Especially with games with longer patch cycles like Ready or Not, there were thorough discussions on when to release the update, with one consideration around releasing earlier to make it within the window of the Steam Awards voting process.

In keeping it organic, it was important to stay involved in the discussions happening on the Discord server and naturally when the topic would come up around the Steam Awards – our vigilant community manager and community volunteers would genuinely join in on the banter and give a slight nudge to vote or keep the conversation going.

To conclude, most engaged fans want to see the game they know and love succeed and will often relish joining in community efforts such as this. However, be sure to understand your audience and know when to ask for vital help. If you manage to make it as a finalist or win the actual award, this will obviously be advantageous as a focal piece for any future marketing to come. So while these marketing goals and spreading awareness of your title are important, it’s your community that you take care of which is key in achieving the above.

Clem van der Merwe
Content Manager | Infernozilla