Marketing guy invents the concept of 'Real Steam' to explain why 'magic' games, AKA good games, end up selling: 'Don't tell Valve'

Charles Zukowski, a game marketing strategist, delivered a talk at Game Developers Conference 2025 on one of the perennial questions for developers big and small: How do you get your game noticed on Steam?

There is, of course, no single answer to that question. Beyond the blindingly simple idea of making a great game, there are factors like early access, wishlists, user reviews, demos and all the backend tools Valve supplies. Zukowski's a bit of a marketing maverick though. He's seen through the Matrix, and beheld "Real Steam."

We get off to an encouraging start. "I have no idea what art is," says Zukowski (thanks, GamesRadar). "I have no concept of art. There's no stat." Nevertheless he graciously acknowledges that some games have that special feel, "like finding true love", and that this opens the door to "Real Steam."

"Some games have the magic, and I don't know what it is," Zuckowski says. "But we can see... the results of the magic." The example given here is audience reactions to a game being in Steam's discovery queue. If those are good or bad that "tells you whether you've had the magic."

And if you get the magic? "[Steam] is an engine that turns magic into money… Real Steam is the goal. Don't tell Valve I told you this."

I'm sure Gabe is scrambling for his yacht's batphone as we speak. More seriously, it's hard to glean genuine insight from the observation that games either catch fire or they don't, and attributing it to some sort of Steam magic comes across like a belated stating of the obvious. What is "Real Steam" you might ask? It's "basically" the Daily Deals program, which—hold on to your hats here folks—often increase a given game's sales.

Zukowski does offer advice for developers who aren't welcomed into the gates of Real Steam, or can at least garner 250 reviews in the first month: Stick a fork in it because you're cooked, brosephine.

This is the area of his talk that does have a little more substance, because Zukowski defines what he means here and has some stats to back it up. "Real Steam" should be considered as achieving gross revenue of $150,000 within six to nine months of release, though of the games that achieve this 74% do it in their first three months.

"I looked at 114,000 games that released last year that didn't have the magic, that didn't get into Real Steam," says Zukowski. "Only one recovered. I found it. I found the one game that pulled the Among Us last year. It's called Beltmatic."

Among Us can be fairly considered an exception to any Steam rule (its popularity exploded two years after release, and this is widely attributed to the 2020 lockdown). Beltmatic on the other hand is a factory sim that, three months after release, had 51 reviews. But after nine months "they somehow pulled it off" and it had over 1,000.

One thing to point out here: Beltmatic's user reviews, which now sit at just under 1,300, are Very Positive. It is clearly a good game.

"I'm gonna be honest with you all, if you don't hit 250 reviews in the first month, it's more than likely not gonna happen," says Zukowski. "It's just not. It's time to move on. Plan B, whatever. It doesn't work. You can't do it afterwards. One game, Beltmatic, was the only one that pulled this off. I'm just gonna be honest. I'm sorry."

There are of course many high quality games that, for one reason or another, never find success on Steam. The main thing developers should take from this talk is that the review stats are stark and do suggest that, even in early access, a product needs to launch in a state where users feel compelled to review it. In other words, which are easy for anyone to say, make a good game that resonates with people, and then when Valve "detects that your game has the magic, they will give you all the visibility they can muster."

Steam is the de facto PC gaming platform, and Valve as its stewards have done a lot more good than bad for developers. It's given small teams access to a global audience, incredible backend tools, and the small chance of having a life-changing smash hit. There will forever be debates over what it does and can do better on discoverability and surfacing the lost gems. But if just calling success "Real Steam" is some sort of answer, I'm not sure it's a useful question.