Choose Wisely Festival: dev summary
The experience of participating in my first Steam festival and launching two Steam games at the same time was really fun! ✨
In a way, I'm glad that I decided to match both the Steam releases of Pippa and Your Phantasmal Problem and The Ice Cream Culprit VNs on the same day as the start of Choose Wisely Festival. It felt like such a perfect time for launch, the pages carried the "new" traffic for the festival, and the festival brought eyes to my VNs' pages; mutually helpful for each other. I hope.
I admit I took forever to decide on which date to release my VNs on Steam. I overthought a lot of things and I became very indecisive about it. The festival did some sort of pushing me to the edge, a now-or-never kind of situation. It was a really good thing. I really need it.
There were also plans to release small e-books with the VNs as DLC but I happened to be really, really busy in the past few months (art market prep, etc.) it wasn't doable. Since it's not urgent, I'm fine with pushing it to a later date.
Since it's my first time participating in a festival, I have nothing else to compare. I am still trying to familiarize myself with Steam's back-end which has way more information than itch.io, and I'm taking my time... But, it's been interesting so far. I could see some charts, a really huge table with information of my VNs' impressions, CTR, number of owners, players, wishlists, etc. I don't know which numbers are relevant for me to pay attention to, perhaps I'll learn as time goes by.
As my VNs are free, I figure it's much easier to get people to "Add to library", to basically collect the games themselves. Interestingly, there are still people wishlisting my games as well. I wonder why, since it's free to grab anyway... But that's a cool thing to know.
Another thing I learnt: I won't receive any notifications about comments and everyone's rating. I'm used to itch.io's emailing me when someone leaves a comment, but on Steam I have to actively check on the game's pages to see new comments. I don't think I'd remember to do this after the first few days of the excitement of releasing new games haha. I did check the community posts in the first two days, answered a question about getting an achievement by a player...
Oh, and I also learnt that I can reply to players' ratings even when they turn comments off! There was one Not Recommended rating in the Ice Cream VN, mentioning about the game's performance that runs too heavily and suspected it has more than what it seemed, in negative connotation (I'm rephrasing as I can't remember much what the complaint was on the top of my head). I'm fine with people not recommending my games, everyone has personal tastes – but this comment felt more like a bug report to me so I replied to it, requesting for more details as I never encountered any of my VNs perform heavily; and my laptop isn't the strongest either. I don't think I received any answers, though... So that problem this player had remains a mystery to me.
One thing I noticed about Steam players: they really like hunting for achievements. People make guides on how to get all the achievements, wrote about how fast they collected them, and such. I like achievements too, but I'm far from being a perfectionist to collect everything. I coded some simple achievements for the VNs for fun, but the purpose is more for me to gather some stats on how far people play and read the VNs, what choices do they pick, etc. Checking the achievements' stats is rather troublesome (quite many clicks to reach the page I want) so I don't think I'll do this very often either...
By the end of the festival, both VNs already have more than 10 reviews! Thank you so much!
Next, I really, really wanted to release Where Is Mrs Peregrine? VN on Steam by the end of this year to commemorate its two-year anniversary! But there won't be any festivals to accompany it, and I wonder whether releasing it by then is a good idea after all? Peregrine VN (and Tuna Rice too) are linear VNs, which is less popular than branching VNs. Pippa and Ice Cream VNs are branching, and perhaps them having quite some reviews within the first week of launch was all thanks to its multiple choices feature.
Considering all these, perhaps it's better to be patient and look into joining a related festival where I can release the rest of my VNs at the same time! The thought of helping bring traffic to the festival with newly released VNs and having more eyes checking on my VNs from the festival is too good to let go.
Meanwhile, for now I can: go back to work on commissions, continue working on my WIP projects, and other art markets participation if I get accepted to more. 💪