Media views and mentions are meaningless if not supported by numbers from Steam. This observation was recently shared on LinkedIn by Artem Shcherbakov, the founder of ROAR Games.
The studio first came into the spotlight last September when it presented Tenet of the Spark, a narrative third-person action game about a guy from the American ghetto. It was revealed then that the project has two key features:
- A combat system inspired by classic beat 'em up games;
- The ability for the protagonist to transform on the fly into a Viking and an Aztec, changing the game environment.
Many gaming media outlets wrote about the project, and the debut trailer amassed at least several hundred thousand views on YouTube (258,000 views on the official channel, with an additional 71,000 on IGN and 66,000 on Punish).
Neither the first nor the second, according to Shcherbakov, simplified communication with publishers.
"When we first announced Tenet of the Spark, we were told not to rush the Steam page launch since we were primarily targeting consoles. We gathered millions of views and received good coverage on social media; everything looked great. However, when we started talking to publishers, surprise, it turned out that Steam wishlists are the only metric that matters," Shcherbakov laments.
From this story, the developer concludes that collecting wishlists should start as soon as the team is ready to say anything about the game.