> Second, Steam does not provide your game any marketing (algorithmic visibility) unless it's already successfully marketed outside of Steam (marketing is not free), and again later once it hits a certain number of sales.

Oh, it's safe to say Steam acts as a big multiplier on whatever attention you manage to scrounge up. Not that this is ideal.

Unfortunately this isn’t true. Elaborating my point above, they only multiply the attention if the tens-hundreds of thousands of storefront views happen in a day or two. If you get a ten million views evenly spread out through the year, they won’t promote. (Speaking for games not for purchase yet)

I’m speaking from experience and it’s explained somewhere on howtomarketagame.com