Finally, with the sale happening at the same time, it would fuel a buying frenzy. We’d see peak concurrent player counts hit 25,000 over the weekend (keep in mind that this is when Steam had only one-tenth the subscribers it has today). The new content brought back existing customers back to the game to check it out and the free weekend added in usually around another 100,000-200,000 players over the weekend. We were already used to the idea that we’d combine a new (free) content update with a free weekend along with a sale and PR efforts around it all. The result was that we saw the uplift on Killing Floor 2 through the sale period as 2-3x higher than our other titles.īut this was all learned off the work we did over the years with the first Killing Floor. Simple example from the Steam Holiday Sale at the end of 2017: We ran a Twisted Christmas event with a significant free content update for Killing Floor 2, but nothing different for other titles such as Rising Storm 2: Vietnam. So we always planned each event carefully - and we still do.

We recognized early on that our mod-style tactics of doing “new stuff” around these events made a big difference to the reaction (as indicated by the sales uplift) during an event. Now, there are something like 15,000+ games on Steam and every single one of them seems to be in the Summer Sale.

With the first Steam Summer Sale Killing Floor was involved in (which would have been 2009), there were only a few hundred games on Steam in total - and not all of them were included in that sale. GamesBeat: I’m sure it’s a combination of factors, but can you speak to the effectiveness of specific tactics like free weekends, discounts bundles, and Steam sales?Īlan Wilson: They all work in their own way, but if there’s one thing we’ve learned, it is that any of these things has limited effect on its own.

Killing floor 1 weapon mod