Even the most expensive advertising campaigns are nothing without a good Steam review score. A studio that manages to shift a game’s review score from “Mixed” to “Very Positive” can as much as triple its chance of making a sale from a marketing campaign, a new games industry report has shown.
Games marketing firm Gamesight published the statistic in its latest Performance Marketing Playbook, as reported by GamesIndustry.biz. Gamesight charted the conversion rates of 30 premium games against their respective Steam review scores, showing that every game with a conversion rate over 2% boasted a Steam review rating over 80% positive.
The report also included a case study that followed a single unnamed game’s 21-month marketing campaign, charting the campaign’s success against its review score at the time. The game generally saw a higher conversion rate when its review score was higher, with the conversion rate peaking at over 7% when the game briefly achieved a rating of “Overwhelmingly Positive.”
Gamesight says it saw similar patterns in other games it studied, while the firm also identified how studios could improve their review scores. “Both from this analysis and our experience working with game developers, we consistently see things like game patches, bug fixes, and adding player-requested features tend to be at the center of these sentiment improvements,” Gamesight data analyst Marlie Tandoc said. The case study game also follows this trend, with its Overwhelmingly Positive spike occurring when the developer added a feature that had been highly requested by players.
Overall, the marketing firm concludes that listening to players and taking their feedback on board is just as important to a game’s success as the money that goes into marketing it. There is one major exception to this trend, however–Gamesight added that free-to-play games saw “no measurable impact” from review scores, as players can simply try the game out with no cost barrier.
A number of successful games have already followed this playbook, with games like No Man’s Sky and Helldivers 2 both seeing major review score turnarounds by implementing updates in response to player feedback. Steam also recently changed the way it displays review scores, acknowledging the major impact these scores can have on a game’s success.
