Really big interview from last month with Slitherine's marketing director. He talks about Epic, but the most interesting part is the tons of things he explains about how Steam works for devs/publishers (a lot of them are things that i never saw mentioned):
Everyeye.it: What about the visibility on the homepage? Do you have to pay for it?
Marco Minoli: Absolutely not. There are a lot of factors in the Steam’s algorithm about how a product makes to the homepage. First of all, if you release a new product, you’re entitled to a million of visuals by default, meaning you’ll appear in the homepage at least a million of times. Then there’re games that genereate a lot of traffic: they have the right to appear again in the homepage, like games that are on a big number of wishlists and have a lot of comments.
In general, there isn’t any way to pay for visibility on any store on PC. You can however activate extra visibility cycles, like when you’re close to release a new DLC or a patch, completely free of charge. When you release a product, you have 5 of these slots to reintroduce your game in the homepage, but you can earn others if your game sells particularly well.
Everyeye.it: Is there a way to estimate the sales of a product?
Marco Minoli: It’s a completely empirical system, and the situations change case by case, but in general we can consider 2500 copies sold every 100 reviews.
Everyeye.it: When you lower a game’s price during a sale, you’re basically making a new price: when the price goes up, do people not buy the game until it’s on sale again?
Marco Minoli: No, on the contrary: consider that during ten days of sales, we sold more copies the week after the promotion compared to the week before it. As I said, the lifespan of a product can last even for five years, especially if supported by DLCs. During those five years, the period when a game sells the most is the third year. That’s why making long-term investments make sense.