It started in December. Women Led Games x The Game Awards was wrapping up and The Storyteller’s Festival was sending out acceptances. Valve was making it increasingly clear that festivals were the way of their future, with an update on how developers could run their own events.
We believe that when they’re well run and well implemented, third-party sales events can accomplish several important goals at once. They make the Store a livelier and more-engaging place for players, they help developers find new audiences for their games, and they help event organizers connect with the Steam-portion of their online communities.
All in all, we’re happy to see third-party sales events gaining popularity on Steam. Since the sales event tools were first introduced to partners in 2020, almost 3,000 sales events have been released on Steam, with the total number in 2024 on pace to grow 20% relative to 2023.
Steamworks Development News
Having been in quite a few developer & Valve-ran festivals, I realized it was time for me to try my hand at it. I’ve hosted game jams for years such as Otome Jam, so I’m no stranger to running developer events. So how hard would running a Steam festival be?
That was December. I started planning my first festival, Otome Games Celebration (which I sometimes called otome fest, or otofest) that month by coming up with guidelines for it. I decided to go with otome for a few reasons – I already host Otome Jam; I’m making otome games; and it was broad enough to be reliably accepted by Valve but also specific enough so I wouldn’t be overwhelmed by submissions. Later that month, right after I released my 3 year project Canvas Menagerie, I publicly posted the interest form for the event.
When pitching a festival to Valve, you have to have games already signed on to the event when you pitch it – they want to see there’s already interest in the idea. I ended up receiving about 45 games in this, which was much more than I probably needed to show there was merit to the idea. I filled out the festival pitch form and submitted it. On January 10th, about 2 weeks after I pitched it, it was accepted by Valve. That was just the beginning of a long journey.
To give a brief overview of how it happened…
- Early December: Begin tinkering with an interest form
- December 20th: Release interest form
- Late December: Pitch the festival with interested games list to Valve
- January 10th: Valve accepted the festival
- January 22nd: Open call for otome games, announcing the festival is actually happening
- March 8th: Open signup form closed
- March 10th: Accepted games were contacted
- March: Streamer & Press form was made public, allowing reviewers to sign up to receive demos & keys
- May 19: Otome Games Celebration began
- May 26: Otome Games Celebration ended
…this doesn’t include a lot of the finer details, like the amount of emails and support tickets back and forth, but does give a rough idea of how many months it took to assemble it all. On the documentation, Valve recommends a minimum of 3 months of planning from concept to festival.
what is a Steam festival?
A Steam festival is an event held on Steam that has its own storepage and features a variety of games around a central topic. Sometimes the theme is visual novels, sometimes its zombies vs vampires. The page showcases a selection of a handful or a few hundred games around this theme, which each game in turn promoting the festival with an automatic banner on their pages. The purpose is to promote similar games, hopefully leading to an increase in sales and wishlists.
In fact, here’s the full page for Otome Games Celebration! …Minus the Trailers section, which refused to be in my full screenshot.
Steam festivals have widgets that further categorize games based on tags, features, and more, depending on how the organizer set it up. Some festivals even have broadcasts, announcements, and more!
The trailers widget is a favorite of mine – it showcases random trailers of games from the festival, rotating through them while the user is on the page.
why should I care about festivals?
Valve has now made it abundantly clear that festivals are their answer to Steam’s lack of niche curation – and even moreso that developer-ran festivals are their solution. Valve has ran festivals starting back in lockdown, with their Steam Next Fest being the most prolific of them, but their category-specific ones like Visual Novel Fest and such are…lackluster, to say the least.
Making festivals rely on developer curation is a good and bad thing. It’s bad because it takes a lot of time to set up and plan for, which means developers have less time to work on their games. But, it’s also good because developers know our niches best, so we can weed out the 3d platforming games that claim to be visual novel just because they moved the tag to the front of their page. Steam festivals allow us the ability to curate the store page for a week, and I’m sure Valve will continue increasing the scope and visibility of festivals.
To put it in simpler terms, if you’re a developer then you should care about festivals because it puts your game in front of people who want things just like your game which means easy visibility and wishlists. If you’re a player then you should care about festivals because they make it easier to find games that you might like. It’s a win-win for everyone involved.
how do you run a Steam festival?
If you’re seriously interested in hosting one, read up on the documentation first, and then come back here to see my thoughts on it. TL;DR I do recommend it, especially if you’re developing games in an under-served niche.
1. the idea
What do you want to hold a festival for? Do you want to hold one for every single hentai game out there, or do you want it to be much more defined? Be specific, as most of the larger categories are already taken. For example, there’s several cozy & wholesome-themed Steam festivals, so go more niche – what about cozy management sims or wholesome story-driven games?
Don’t be so specific that you can only find 5~ other games that match your topic, but don’t go so broad that you’ll have 2,000+ games eligible to enter.
2. the pitch (to devs)
Now, you have to pitch it to your fellow devs. Be sure to outline things as well as you can.
- What games are eligible? What games aren’t eligible?
- What is the time frame for the festival? It’s okay to not have a specific week just yet, but you should have a month in mind.
- How will you keep in contact with developers? Will you contact developers not accepted, or only accepted developers?
- What categories will the games fall under on your page? (what widgets will you create to help players find the right types of games?)
You don’t need information like their legal name or phone number (PLEASE stop asking for these…!!!) but you will need their email, Steam game, and Steam AppID.
For Otome Games Celebration, our final eligibility rules looked like this:
We’re looking for games that meet all of this criteria:
- be able to play as a female protagonist (chooseable gender is OK)
- must be focused on romance / have a heavy emphasis on romance
- at least 1 male love interest
- must be a story-driven visual novel or a visual novel hybrid
- must call itself an otome somewhere (long description, social media marketing, tags, etc.)
- not explicitly porn (some sexual content OK)
- no AI generations, including any games using assets that are AI generated
Games will be accepted to the festival at our discretion. Rejected games will not be informed due to the volume of submissions. Both released games and upcoming games are accepted.
Only submit games where you are the developer or publisher.
Otome Games Celebration Steam Festival Sign Up
A loose definition of an otome game is where the player can play as a woman and romance men, which is what we expanded on here. Romance is a central aspect of otome games, so several of the bullets are about that. Since this was my first festival, I didn’t want to send out rejection emails which would’ve overwhelmed my workload. And lastly, I specified to only submit games you own because I had a couple of otome fans submit random otome games they definitely didn’t work on.
(older otome fans may notice that we asked games to be visual novels, whereas the origins of otome were more strategy game than visual novel – modern otome games are almost entirely visual novels, but we accept hybrid games and would accept classic strategy games if they’re meant to be otome. the visual novel stipulation is mostly in response to modern otome being VNs and to weed out some of the games on Steam that call themselves “dating sims” just because they have heart points and such)
3. the pitch (to Valve)
After you’ve assembled 20-40 games that have agreed to be in the festival, you should be ready to pitch it to Valve. Be sure to go back over the documentation for festivals and have an idea of what you want out of the festival.
Will you have a livestream with the festival, making it a showcase, or will you just have the Steam page? How do you pitch your festival? Is it mostly for showcasing the niche, or is it focused on sales for the niche? When exactly will you hold the festival?
4. the announcement
Hopefully a week or two after your pitch, Valve accepted it and gave you a store page to play with. If they did, then great!
The work begins here.
Duplicate your interest form and retool it to be an official submissions form. Change the info to the exact date you submitted to Valve as well as any other fine-tuning. I waited about 2 weeks to do my official announcement until we had our lovely logo, done by notafish.
For the full announcement, I shared it in the various visual novel & otome development Discords I’m in as well as on my social media, which got shared around quite a bit. I’m already well connected in the visual novel sphere, but for people that aren’t you’d have to do some serious hustling to connect with your fellow devs. The official sign ups were also added to the Worthy festivals for Indie games spreadsheet and later shared in the HTMAG’s newsletter which has a section for up upcoming festivals.
I kept the form open for almost 2 months until March 8th, which is longer than you probably need it to be. I made notes while the games came in on which games I’d accept and which games definitely didn’t follow the guidelines, so that when the signups closed I had already made some progress.
5. the purge
Now is probably the most time-consuming part of it all – going through the submissions one by one and deciding their fate. Some games like “[Noun] VR Simulator” were clearly just submitting to every festival and were easy to weed out, meanwhile others were harder to determine.
Come up with your “tie-breaker” guidelines.
Based on the eligibility guidelines you made for submissions, you need to come up with ways to deal with games that are kind of eligible, games that aren’t clear-cut acceptances. For me, that was determining what to do with games that didn’t clearly state they were otome games. I had several submissions that were clearly romance visual novels, but didn’t clarify what kind of romance they were nor who you play as. I determined these were against the rules I set for the festival and declined them.
I ended up with 120~ final games & DLC from 85~ developers, which was a solid amount for a first-time festival. The more games you have in a festival, the less visibility each game gets, but the fewer games you have in a festival, the less visibility the overall festival gets. It’s a tricky balance!
6. the emails
After leaving spreadsheet hell (for now), you get to email everyone who’s games you accepted! This can just be a quick email saying they’re accepted with more information to follow. Given how early I did submissions, I had 2 months before the festival to prepare for it with the finished games.
I used Kit (formerly ConvertKit) to manage my emails, which was…..eh. I’ve used a variety of platforms over the years but theirs has a bit too many options for me while not having enough options for other things (why can’t I see who didn’t open my emails?). I also later received some complaints about emails being sent to spam, but there’s not really anything I can do about that other than swap platforms.
7. the preparation
You’ve now got a lot of accepted games and a WIP storefront page. Time to prepare!
I started by creating a Notion doc for all of the participants, as a place to have centralized information and links. I put all the information in one place and updated it as needed, which was very helpful. (however, I’m not sure I’ll use Notion in the future, given their insistence on forcing AI “tools” onto users)
With notafish doing the graphic design, I tackled the character artwork. Most festivals (most, but not all) have a mascot or key visual which gives players an idea of the vibes for the event. I ended up drawing my own mascot Rimia for the event, giving her balloons to show the celebration aspect.
8. the page
Setting up the Steam page was both much easier and much harder than I expected. Valve updated the festival platform at least twice while I was working on the festival page, making the system more robust each time. The system is basically the Steam events system, but with a lot of added features – I can’t go much in detail on it here, other than they really put a lot of functionality into it.
If you tinker with it, you can add a lot of customization to the page, like you can see in my low-res screenshot at the beginning of this post. The widgets allow you to show games based on backend Steam data like tags, demos, availability, and more. You can even add Steam tags and custom tags to games, which is how I created our All Male LI and Non-Male LI categories. Truly, the world is your oyster if you try!
While it didn’t take me too long to figure out the festival building system, it did take me quite a while to set it up. I sunk several hours into getting the page exactly how I wanted it to because I was being nitpicky and fiddling with all the options.
9. the streamers
Marketing a Steam festival requires a decently large strategy, so to accomplish this I wanted to collaborate with streamers – or at least, let them aware of the festival. The festival at this point was already taking more time than I had expected to set up, so I needed whatever streamer event to not take up much of my time.
I created a Streamer & Press form for reviewers to sign up and receive updates on the festival, as well as give their consent to send their contact info to the developers in the festival. This put the effort of reaching out to streamers onto the developers, but also gave them easy contacts to people who expressly wished to be contacted. At least 1 developer told me this helped them get over the awkwardness of contacting reviewers, as they knew these people had given consent.
According to my exit survey for the developers, about 25% of them reached out to reviewers on the list, with all of those people saying their games were covered. It’s a slightly low turnout for people using it, but it was also low effort on my end and did help the people who did use it. It was very fun seeing all the streams go live during the event and getting streamers involved in it!
Some festivals do showcases like Wholesome Games, where they work with streamers to do a livestreamed event showcasing various trailers and developer interviews. These take a lot of work to set up, but I wanted to try doing one for Otome Games Celebration. My idea was to do a simple showcase where I hand-picked 20~ games from the festival, ask them for a trailer and a short game blurb, and have a streamer show these on their stream. It wouldn’t need to be rendered as each of the trailers are already existing and would simply need to be played, and also wouldn’t be too much work for any party involved. For time reasons we weren’t able to do this this year, but I’d love to do this in the future. (also, feel free to take this low effort idea for your own events!)
10. the festival
I submitted the page for review about a week and a half before the start date and it was accepted within a day, so everything was ready. I scheduled the event to go public right as the event started, which meant I was done with the festival page itself. There was still a lot of emails to be answered, though!
The festival went live at 12PM CST on May 19th and lasted a week until May 26th. We weren’t able to keep our Daily Deal slot, which is front page featuring from Valve, but every festival still gets some visibility – namely, being listed on the Special Events Page and each of the games involved having a big banner at the top.
what could’ve gone better?
Nothing went bad, but there were some parts I was unaware of or things I wish I did differently.
- I didn’t realize the time is set by me, not Valve. I submitted the page assuming the start time would be 12PM PST, as that’s the normal time for Valve events, but didn’t realize I can set the time – and that it’s auto set to noon my timezone (CST). So some of our graphics displayed the incorrect timezone because I didn’t set the time.
- The streamer event could’ve been bigger, had I reached out to more streamers and worked harder on doing a showcase. Next year, I hope to email more streamers ahead of time to inform more people about the event.
- Our mixture of released:upcoming games wasn’t bad, but I didn’t realize until after I’d accepted games that I needed to be more aware of the release state of the games. We ended up with about half and half, but in the future I need to focus on more released games, preferably a 60:40 split. Festivals bring in visibility to upcoming games, but released games are the ones that bring in visibility to the festival.
- Likewise, a lot of the developers in the festival were newer to Steam and festivals – 30% of participants had never been in a developer-ran Steam festival before – so I wasn’t aware that I needed to give more resources & information to the developers. I want to help more devs get comfortable with Steam, but I wasn’t aware how many weren’t used to Steam before the event.
what went well?
Overall, I think the festival went great! I do wish it got more visibility, though the average wishlist count per game was 423~ wishlists. We were able to get a fair amount of streamer interaction and give views to a lot of indie developers from all around the world. While I’m in the English development sphere, we had some participants with games in other languages, which was great and something I’d like expanded on next year.
Thanks to notafish, we were able to have a variety of assets for the festival that all looked wonderful, with multiple social media asset templates and even a streamer overlay.
Final festival stats:
- 160~ submitted games
- 126 accepted games & DLC
- 85~ developers
- 423~ mean wishlists earned per game
- 22~ reviewers signed up
- 56k+ visits to the festival page
should I run a Steam festival?
YES!!
If you’re a Steam developer and you’ve ever ran gaming events like game jams, then take a shot at running a Steam festival. Festivals are Valve giving us the tools to curate Steam, so it’s up to us to take the keys and go for it.
I’d love to see festivals like:
- Mystery Visual Novels
- Queer Visual Novels
- Casual Games Fest
And more! Bring visual novels to the forefront of Steam!! Make everyone play visual novels!!! Visual novels or nothing!!!!
what should I know?
Some things I wish I’d have known beforehand…
- This is time consuming. It’s not hard, but it’s going to take a fair amount of your time, at least 15+ hours.
- If you want front page featuring, you need heavy hitters – games that have sold well and will continue to sell well.
- There are a lot of assets needed for it – from the store page assets to the social media assets and more.
- You need to set the time of the festival on the festival page, not Valve (whoops).
- You need to set the festival page to live, not Valve (same way you would a regular Steam event).
- To have a good festival, you have to have good curation and a good marketing plan. You won’t be able to accept every game.
- There’s so many emails to answer and send. So many.
Don’t be afraid to ask for advice from others while building out your festival or ask your Valve rep on the Steam tickets. My Valve rep was a big help for me and always got back to me quickly – they want you to succeed!
Lastly… Go for a niche you’re passionate about! Visual novels are my bread and butter and I want to continue supporting the medium in any way I can. Pick something you’re passionate about and go with that.
To wrap things up, I have a few words of thanks I want to give. Thank you to all my friends and acquaintances who listened to my inane rambles about the festival, even as I repeated myself multiple times over the months, and supported me regardless. Thank you notafish for doing the beautiful graphic design for the event, giving it such a festive look worthy of a celebration. Thank you Gabby for answering my silly questions and being so supportive of the event. Thank you to all of the streamers who signed up on the streamer form and covered the event, and thank you to all of the other streamers who found the event and felt it was cool enough to cover. And thank you to all of the developers and players for believing in the event! I hope to bring Otome Games Celebration back next year. …And maybe something else before then.
May is practically done now with pride month very close on the horizon. I’ve got a very busy pride ahead of me – 3 game releases, including my own dark boys love visual novel Asphodelium and Studio Élan’s dark fantasy yuri A Tithe in Blood, and 2 conventions, in-person at Offkai Expo with Studio Élan and online at Citrus Con for my own works. Give me the strength to make it through June…!!
— Arimia