Steam showed my game 43,592 times. I drove 5% of that. The algorithm did the rest.
Soul Strip’s Steam page got approved a week ago. I didn’t buy ads or email any press — I wouldn’t know who to email. I just put the page up and kept posting the same handful of organic things on X and Telegram I’d been posting before approval.
Here’s what the first 7 days of Steam traffic actually look like:
- Views (page impressions): 43,592
- Visits (people who clicked through): 1,729
- Click-through rate: ~4%
43k people saw something pointing at Soul Strip. About 1 in 25 clicked. The ratio isn’t the surprising part — where the impressions came from is.
The breakdown
| Source | Views | Visits | CTR |
|---|---|---|---|
| Store traffic (Steam discovery) | 41,163 | 1,573 | 3.82% |
| External traffic (off-Steam links) | 2,387 | 120 | 5.03% |
| Steam platform traffic (friends, library) | 42 | ~36 | ~85% |
Store traffic is the algorithm doing its job — Discovery Queue, “More Like This” rails, search, related-game widgets. People browsing the storefront saw Soul Strip in a list and either kept scrolling or clicked. 95% of every impression came from this one channel.
External traffic is everyone who landed from outside Steam: clicks from X, Telegram, this blog, the Discord. 2,387 views over the whole week — everything I personally did.
Steam platform traffic is friend feeds and library recommendations. Tiny in volume, already-warm, hence the absurd ~85% CTR. Those people convert no matter what the capsule looks like.
I spent three days reading the 4% wrong
My first instinct was that the 3.82% store CTR was a verdict on my capsule — too low, fix the art. It’s not that simple. That number is how the capsule does standing next to thousands of other indie capsules in the same Discovery Queue, which is a different question than whether the capsule is any good. External CTR is a touch higher (5.03%) because someone clicking from a tweet already self-selected: they saw a screenshot they liked and decided to look. Higher conviction, much smaller pool.
The capsule and screenshots are the actual product page, and a 1% lift there outweighs tripling how much I post. That part I expected.
I thought the tweets were the traffic
Going in, I assumed external posting drove most early page traffic. That’s the folklore — tweet a lot, post on Reddit, do Sharing Saturday, watch the visits roll in. The data says 95% of impressions came from Steam itself and 5% from everything I did by hand.
That’s not an argument for going quiet. External views convert higher, and there’s a loop I can’t measure directly: more external clicks read to Steam as “people care about this,” which feeds more Store impressions. So those 2,387 external views might be quietly propping up the 41,163 from Store.
But for a brand-new page, the algorithm is the traffic. My posts keep it interested; they don’t replace it. The new-page bonus — Steam testing a fresh page in Discovery rails for a few weeks — is free distribution that won’t last, so the job right now is using it while it’s here.
Week 2 is the real test
Week 2 is the next number. I expect impressions to drop as the new-page bonus tapers, and the demo going up for Next Fest is what should bend the curve back. I’ll come back with the actual figure — even if I’m wrong about the direction, I’ll show the miss.
If you launched a brand-new Steam page and external traffic gave you more than 5% of impressions, find me on the community channels and show me — I don’t believe it. The Soul Strip demo is on itch while the Steam build finishes.