10 Steam Broadcasting Mistakes

There are a few ways to sabotage a perfectly decent Steam broadcasting campaign. Most are small mistakes, not some mysterious failure of Steam's algorithm.

Ten mistakes to avoid:

1. Broadcasting the demo App ID. The demo is a separate Steam app. When you want footage on the main game's store page, Valve says to configure the base game's App ID. See the demo streaming guide.

2. Leaving the broadcast on Friends Only. Excellent for a private test. Useless for reaching visitors on the public store page. Switch to Public when ready.

3. Missing broadcaster permissions. Steam needs to know that the account is allowed to stream for your game. The official broadcast FAQ explains whitelisting through events or store settings.

4. Streaming the main menu for half an hour. A player wants to see the game. Show actual decisions, action or progression. Remember that players can visit your page at any point in your Broadcast - make sure they are not bored!

5. For events, sales etc - Starting at the exact advertised minute. Steam says event-associated broadcasts can take up to five minutes to appear. Start a little earlier.

6. Ignoring the audio. Distorted music, silent footage and loud menu clicks make a longer stream unbearable. Check it on headphones and a laptop speaker.

7. Getting the encoder settings wrong. Streaming at high bitrates and high resolution WILL HURT your broadcast. Steam downgrades high bandwidth streams and they take longer to buffer on Steams Broadcast page which means longer wait times and page load times. Small punchy videos, no more than 10 minutes of footage is ideal.

Broadcastloop fixes this for you.

8. Expecting a homepage feature. Steam says popular broadcasts may appear on its homepage. The game's page and Community Broadcast hub are normal broadcast locations. Don't plan your entire marketing calendar around an optional placement.

9. Forgetting the wishlist journey. If the stream is for an upcoming game, make sure its main Steam page is ready and it is obvious what the player should do next. Nice graphics, good text and screenshots etc.

10. Never measuring anything. Check daily wishlist additions. If the footage isn't holding attention, improve it instead of leaving it on for another month unchanged.

P.S.

For time critical launches, I'd set up a short test (Video saying, "coming soon"), verify it publicly from another browser, save the settings and only then announce the event. Swap out the video when you are ready to launch. Not very glamorous, but neither is discovering a black video player after two days of promotion.

Visit your page from another Steam account on a different PC to be sure! If your problem is simply that you don't want a computer feeding the stream 24/7, BroadcastLoop can take that part off your plate. Get started here.