How To Get ‘Overwhelmingly Positive’ on Steam - Like Robobeat - One of the Best Indie Games of 2024

Do you know how hard it is for a new game to get an 'Overwhelmingly Positive' review score on Steam? Really hard - which is relevant because today ROBOBEAT, developed by Simon Fredholm and published by Kwalee last week, has done just that.

Let me walk you through how impressive this is: being one of the best indie games of the year and getting the maximum player review score on Steam is like going to Miramar in Top Gun - only the best of the best make it.

Unlike Metacritic review scores (which are collated from four or more professional review sites), Steam scores are only generated by players who have bought the game.

Scores from paid creators, team members, the media or anyone who got a key for free don't factor - only legit players with time logged in the game count.

🕹 After 10 reviews, your game will get a label
🕹 80% or more 'Thumbs Up' recommendations = A 'Positive' score
🕹 80% or more after 50 reviews= A 'Very Positive' score
🕹 95% or more after 500 reviews = An 'Overwhelmingly Positive' score

Just over a week after it launched, ROBOBEAT received its 500th legitimate player review.

10 were negative - some people didn't like the genre, some struggled to shoot in time to the beat, one just wasn't very good at it. Fair enough. You can't please everyone all the time. Plus ça change.

But that means that an astounding 98% of players who bought ROBOBEAT loved it.

Bear with me while I give you some context on this:

🎮 There are over 73,000 PC games for sale on Steam (SteamDB.info)
🎮 Last year alone,14,569 new games were released
🎮 That works out at around 40 new games Every. Single. Day.
🎮 Only 2,032 of all games on Steam have an 'Overwhelmingly Positive' player review score, or 2.7% (GG.deals)*

These games drinking the rarified air in the upper echelons of game development are universally loved - the gameplay, the art, the production quality, the music, the character arcs, the bug fixing, the narrative flow - everything needs to click for a game to work.

But not all of the best indie games are created equal - AAA titles, the blockbusters, sit alongside indie titles like ROBOBEAT - which is like me going speed dating next to Brad Pitt...

AAA games often have dev teams in their hundreds, cost tens to hundreds of millions to make and have marketing budgets that would make Nike weep. For example, Baldur's Gate 3's development budget alone was over $100 million (according to IGN).

The reason I'm going into such detail is simple - ROBOBEAT was developed by one man, Simon, backed up by the production, QA, marketing and supporting teams in Kwalee PC and console publishing. And it's up there at the pinnacle of the games industry and one of the best indie games of the year.

In game dev terms, this is summiting Everest. A remarkable achievement - and my highest praise goes out to all involved.

You can learn all about ROBOBEAT on its website and buy the game on Steam, plus you can join over 10,000 fans in ROBOBEAT’s Discord and follow all news and updates on its socials @robobeatgame