nonbinary coded games - running a third-party steam event for the first time

i recently organised a steam event with fellow dev nomnomnami to showcase games made by nonbinary devs, & now that it's over, i thought i'd share how it went, since arimia's post about running a steam event was really helpful to us too! (thank you arimia for also answering questions i had about the event process 🙇)

hopefully this info can be of help to anyone else who wants to run an event on steam & is curious about the process!

›› nonbinary coded games store event page! ‹‹

numbers are fun! the data

• 180+ games
• 140+ devs

out of the games,

• ~45% on discount
• ~30% "coming soon" (not released yet)
• ~30% steam deck playable or verified
• ~5% free

for some more granular info from the participants who filled out our feedback form:

• average +411 wishlists per game
• 48% contacted people on the streamers & press list, out of which 98% had their games covered
• 73% had teams of three or fewer people
• 18% were participating in a third-party steam event for the first time ever, while 50% have participated in three or fewer
• 73% found out about the event through bluesky, 11% from other social media & sites, 8% from word of mouth, 5% specifically from this website called how to market a game which seems to list festivals, & 3% from direct contact through hosts

while we did have (in my opinion) a fair amount of games, on average participants were fairly small indie dev teams & many of them were new-ish to third-party steam events. this was also our first time running a steam sale event, so we learnt a lot throughout the process.

a timeline

the whole process from the idea to the event actually happening took about four months.

• march 20: we decide we want to do an event
• march 21: poke some nb devs we know to see if there's interest (& there is!) & contact steam support for the first time to apply to run a steam event
• march 24: response from steam asking to confirm if we have a final list of apps yet (at this point no, so we tell them this but share the list of apps we have at this point to review) & steam support lets us know that it'll be sent to the review team & they'll get back to us once they know more

• april 29: our steam support help request is closed for inactivity without them ever getting back to us......... so we ask them to reopen 😅
• may 2: steam approves the event so we have a sale page to work with!
• may 3: open call for games by nonbinary devs
• may 19: open call submission form closed
• may 22: event acceptance emails sent

• may 23: put up a form for streamers & press who want to cover the event
• june 1: nami draws the absolutely awesome promo art so we start setting up the steam sale page to put all the games in categories &c.
• july 2 : finalised steam sale page submitted for review by steam
• july 7: steam page is approved!
• july 13: event begins!

things to take note of

& now back in the present. i think overall the event ran pretty smoothly though there were a few hiccups that i'd like to note for anybody who wants to run their own event:

• if steam support hasn't got back to you within like a week you probably want to poke them to make sure they haven't forgotten you 😅
• it seems most people release an interest form first to have a more full list of apps when first approaching steam. this is probably a better idea than what we did!
• if you think your event will have devs who aren't familiar with how third-party steam events are run, you'll probably want more detailed questions & instructions

• we missed that you have to have the organisers listed in the promo images for the sale event so we had to resubmit our final page for approval
• we actually published the sale page once it was approved but it probably would have been better to set the sale page to publish at the evennt start so that it was only 'revealed' then
• we sent out some press releases to mainstream games media about the event but it doesn't seem like outlets actually picked it up lol so at least for us it wasn't worth the effort lol
• conversely, the streamers & press who submitted info to our form were great & streamed/reviewed lots of games so yay & thank you!
• you can close comments on your event discussions if you don't want random people drive-by commenting on your event. since our event was for nonbinary devs, this got some people posting bigoted comments so we deleted them & closed the comments.
• we included free games in the event but i believe that in general free games aren't really a 'draw' for sale events (people want discounts!) so probably having a larger amount of paid games that are already released is better for getting people to the steam sale page

• we didn't do a video showcase or streams on the event page this time but that's something other sale events have done & is worth considering for people who have the bandwidth to organise that kind of thing!
• we made promotional image templates for people to slot in their main capsule images, but different formats that would allow for vertical capsules too
• if using google forms, there's an option that logs participants' email addresses & sends them copies of their forms! we didn't do this, but i think we should have, because we got some emails & form feedback saying stuff like 'i thought i put my game in x section' & when i checked their form info, they hadn't ticked the box for x. if participants have a copy of their form submission, they can check the info & update if necessary

also, a specific note because it was something i didn't know before doing this event... it turns out that the way discounted games are checked on steam sale event page is different in tabs vs sections.

for tabs, automatic filtering reads info from the tags on the games. tags are determined at the time of import, so if for example you wanted to have a category just for 'coming soon' games but you use the automatic filtering, you might have games that have already released in your 'coming soon' category since they had still been coming soon when you imported the list of games for the event... same issue with 'discounted' &c.

you can sync the tag info for your list after importing, but even if you do, you won't be able to get an accurate list of games that will be discounted during your event since there's no guarantee that all the games will be discounted when you sync the list (& likely they won't be).

that means that if you want to use tabs in this way, you should manually add games to the tabs yourself & make sure to have questions like 'is this game going to be discounted during the event?' & 'will this game be released by the time of the event' to match the tabs in your form so you know which games to add.

feedback we had from participants

these are some comments we had in our feedback form! some of these i think might not be actionable for every event, but i thought it might be helpful to share in case people want to consider it for their own events:

• wanted a discord server or something for participants to communicate, maybe something similar for streamers as well

• promotional images in 4:5 & 9:16 would be useful for instagram & tiktok
• auto-scrolling capsules on the steam page made it hard for people to actually click into games they were interested in since they kept changing with no way of stopping the scrolling

• participants who posted on mastodon didn't have much traction as the main event posts were on bluesky
• would be nice to have now broadcasting assets for participants who want to stream on their steam page for the event
• awkward timing since it was right after the summer sale event which meant putting the game on sale twice in a short period of time
• more specific genre splits on the game submission form & for the streamer list to make it easier for devs to connect with streamers who would be interested in the type of game they make

additional feedback from responses on bluesky:

• give streamers a heads up on when to expect to hear from devs so they have a general idea of when they'll start getting emails
• not just for steam events, but using mail merge with gmail & google sheets can help devs send out emails with different keys to streamers automatically

separately, since i release a lot of games on itch & i think that might be the same for people reading this...

A STEAM SALE EVENT IS WAY EASIER TO DEAL WITH THAN A BIG CO-OP BUNDLE ON ITCH!!!!

after the initial one month of radio silence, steam support was very quick to get back to us whenever we asked any questions. we didn't need all applicants to look over the page & 'confirm' their participation through it, & we could easily add/remove games on our end.

the sale page also lets you customise it with categories to show things like games that are discounted, games with demos, games that are already out, games that are coming soon, &c. so it's easy for a player to go through & find a game they like!

i know that itch bundles aren't the same as steam sale events since for itch bundles the idea is that you buy ALL the games in it for a very cheap price... but the idea is often similar in that both steam sale events & big itch bundles are often held to showcase games for a specific purpose.

i also understand that the people behind itch absolutely don't have the same amount of resources as the people at steam/valve, so i don't expect the process to be as smooth - but i definitely went into this thinking a steam sale event could be a huge amount of work like dealing with a big bundle on itch is, & i was very pleasantly surprised when it wasn't.

in conclusion?

if you are a dev on steam & have thought 'i wish there were an event for x y z' but there isn't... honestly, maybe give running it yourself a go! it definitely wasn't as annoying as i thought it would be & i'm very glad we did it.

it would have been a lot more work if i did it alone though, so thanks to nami for organising this with me 🙇 in particular it just helped to have someone to go through the list of games together with & talk to throughout the event prep so there were always two sets of eyes on anything that went out to participants.

throughout the process, we received a lot of messages from participants thanking us for having an event specifically for nonbinary devs, so i'd like to share a bit of the message i sent out at the end of the event:

i've had my games in events before where they'd be for "women! (& marginalised genders)" while all the promo images would only have "WOMEN" in big text - it always made me feel out of place. but in organising this event with nami, i've found out about so many more nonbinary devs making cool games! this event has helped me feel like maybe there's a place in the game dev community that i can belong to 💜

i hope that this event can help other devs feel like they belong in this community too, & that more events like it spring up.

i want to emphasise that nami & i are just two indie devs & i mean that in the smallest sense of the term - we're two people who each like to make games on our own. we're not publishers. we're not funded by companies or sponsors. nonbinary coded games wasn't run by steam - it was just two people who thought, hey, maybe it'd be cool if there was an event for people like us, so we did it!

if you want to do it, you can do it too. & i hope you do!!!

for info about when the next nonbinary coded games will be, you can keep an eye on nonbinarycodedgames.neocities.org, the spiffy website nami made for it!! people on neocities can follow the page too.

to wrap things up have a very long screenshot of the steam page...