We knew that if we wanted to reach more players, we needed to get the game on Steam. And, as you know, it's not as simple as just loading your game on Steam and start selling it - you need to get the game Greenlit first. That is, ask for the community to have a look at your game, and give a yes/no vote whether they'll play it or not if it were to become available on the platform.
If you're a brand new developer on Steam, it costs $100 to get in. All of this money goes to a charity. It basically prevents the system to get flooded with less serious titles. Luckily, it's a once off fee. once you've paid the $100, you're in permanently.
In South Africa, at the time, $100 was equal to about ZAR1200. Quite a few bucks if it's money you don't have. We scraped the money together, hoping that the game will get Greenlit and recuperate that money eventually, but we definitely thought we're going to be in this for the long haul...
We had NO idea how long it would take, but we went for it. We paid the $100, and got our game ready to go through the Greenlight process. We read all kinds of posts about getting your game through on Greenlight all over the internet - I'm not going to share everything we learned, just the most important ones.
Firstly, have a nice video or two, and a few decent screen shots. This will be the first thing a person sees when he visits your Greenlight page. Also, I see a lot of devs have ads running on their Youtube clips - I personally don't like this. If I can make a suggestion, don't load ads on the clips you're going to use on Greenlight...
Next, you are allowed to format the description quite nicely, and that includes adding pictures. This really spruces up your Greenlight page - so many times I've seen just one paragraph of text explaining the game. This is your second resort to convincing someone to try your game, so make sure you put some effort into this page. Here what ours look like:
See, a decent description mentioning the main game mechanics (you know, stuff your players would actually be interested in!) and include some nice graphics - we did it in the form of headings, and used our in-game assets to spice them up.
Also, be to the point in your writing, and make sure you don't have grammar or spelling errors - get someone to help proof read if you have to!
Getting the process going
After loading our game on Greenlight, the first day was great, we had over 50 yes votes, and thought this is going to be a lot easier than we thought. We couldn't have been more wrong. After the first few days, our votes slowed down to about one or two yes votes per day. If we needed 1500 yes votes (which is not necessarily the amount you need - I guess nobody will ever know haha - we needed about 1300 to get Greenlit, but others have needed more or even less), it'll take years at this rate.
Also, you can see how many votes in total you get - so including how many people said no. This can be a bit disheartening, but don't let it phase you too much (if you can haha!). Remember, there are millions of users on Steam, and it's impossible for every single person to like your game. It's nothing against you personally, it's just not something they'd end up buying if it becomes available. Also, we have a very niche genre for our game - a combination of turn-based, rpg, sci-fi and roguelike made our game a bit harder to target people for. If you have a half decent FPS, you probably won't need to even look at this article hehe.
We tried our best to get more votes in, including joining various Facebook groups (waste of time in my opinion), asking all my Steam friends (all 7 of them haha!), loading the "Help us get on Greenlight" badge on various of our sites (a luxury many devs won't have), but the votes were still only streaming in very slowly...
One thing we did end up doing though, was load our game on IndieDB, The exposure we got from that was great! So much so, that someone from Groupees contacted us about including our game on their next Build a Greenlight Bundle. It's a great way to promote Indie devs who have their games on Greenlight, and to make a few bucks in the process. We were all too happy about this, because it was massive exposure we couldn't have gotten otherwise, and finally a chance to make some money back, even if just a few hundred dollars!
The bundle ran for 2 or 3 weeks (can't remember exactly how long) and the response was massive on our Greenlight page. All of a sudden we had an influx of yes votes, and when the bundle was over with, we got over 1000 more yes votes on our profile! The bundle sold over 4000 copies in the end :)
And, a week or two after that, we got this magical email from Steam congratulating us on getting Greenlit. It took us 46 days.
So, to sum up, here's what we did that I think helped:
1. Have decent videos and screen shots of your game
2. Write a proper description of your game, and include images to spice it up.
3. If you're game is finished already, try to get in on a Bundle - we used Groupees and got excellent service from them.
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