Launch week is when months of wishlist building either convert or quietly leak away. The studios that survive it well aren't the ones with the biggest budget they're the ones who treated launch as an operations problem with a clear runbook. Here is the game launch week checklist we actually run for clients, day by day.
The single most expensive mistake we see is shipping a build or a Steam page change on launch day itself. Steam's store updates can take hours to propagate, and a broken depot at 9am Pacific is unrecoverable while your traffic peaks. Treat the 72 hours before launch as a freeze window for everything that isn't a hotfix.
- Upload the launch build to a default branch and play it from a clean Steam install, not the editor.
- Verify your store page renders in every language you support truncated descriptions and missing screenshots cost conversion.
- Confirm regional pricing is set everywhere; an unset region defaults to a USD conversion that can look absurd locally.
- Schedule the discount (launch discounts must be configured at least a week ahead, so don't leave it to the wire).
- Test that your Gameplay Trailer autoplays correctly above the fold on both desktop and the mobile store.
Don't fire everything at the launch minute. Your wishlist notification email goes out automatically from Steam that's your single biggest traffic spike, and it lands within the first hour. Layer your owned channels around it rather than competing with it: Discord and your mailing list 30 minutes before, social at launch, and press follow-ups an hour later once the page is confirmed live and stable.
Keep a single shared document open with everyone who can post, listing exact send times and copy. Launch day is chaos, and a duplicate or contradictory post from a teammate undermines the one clean message you spent weeks planning.
Your review score in the first 48 hours sets the tone Steam's algorithm uses to decide how much to show your game. Below 70% positive and you fall out of favorable visibility fast. This means review management isn't a community-team nicety during launch week it's a core conversion lever.
Read every negative review the moment it lands. Most early negatives are about a specific, fixable thing: a controller binding, a crash on a GPU you didn't test, an unclear tutorial step. Patch the top complaint within 24 hours and post about it, and you'll watch fence-sitters flip their reviews positive.
Launch week is the worst time to start learning your paid channels. If you're running paid acquisition, the audiences and creatives should already be validated in the weeks before launch is for scaling what works, not testing. Pour budget into a cold campaign on day one and you'll burn it teaching the algorithm while your conversion window closes.
Watch your store conversion rate alongside spend, not just clicks. A campaign sending cheap traffic that doesn't wishlist or buy is actively hurting you, because Steam reads low-converting visits as a weak signal. If you haven't modeled your numbers yet, our Steam Wishlist Calculator and a sober Paid Ads Setup the month before will tell you whether the math even works.
Launch isn't a day, it's a week-long sprint. Hold a short daily check-in covering the same four things every morning so nothing slips while everyone is exhausted and elated.
- Review score trend and the single top complaint to address next.
- Wishlist-to-purchase conversion and refund rate (a high refund rate flags a real problem, not bad luck).
- Which traffic source is actually converting, so you can shift effort toward it.
- Any build or store fix queued, with a named owner and a deploy time outside peak hours.
If you'd rather not run this solo while also fixing crashes, this is exactly the kind of week where having an operator in your corner pays for itself we're happy to walk through your launch plan whenever you're ready.