16 Jul 2026 · 5 min read
Before your game ships, the wishlist count is close to the only signal that exists, and it runs almost entirely through the store page. Most visitors arrive once, from a Reddit thread, a Discord link, or a festival listing, often in a timezone where you're asleep. Valve's own rules say you don't have to leave that page static while you wait for launch day: Coming Soon pages are explicitly allowed to broadcast, prerecorded and unattended, for as long as you want.
Before release you have no reviews, no player count, no community screenshots to point to. Almost everything that will matter at launch traces back to how many people wishlisted the game beforehand, and that number moves through the store page or not at all. Every visitor who lands there before release is being asked, implicitly, to trust that the game is real and worth remembering weeks or months later. A page with a trailer already playing answers part of that question before they've read a word of the description.
We don't have data quantifying how much a looping trailer moves a wishlist count, and we're not going to invent any here - the honest, hedged version of that argument is in how broadcasts and wishlists connect. What we can say is mechanical, not statistical: a static page looks the same on the day the Coming Soon listing goes up as it does six weeks later when nobody has touched it. A page with something moving on it doesn't.
This matters more before launch than after it, because after launch a store page has other things doing the work of proving the game is real: reviews, a player count, a release date that already happened. Before launch none of that exists yet, so the page is carrying more weight with less material. A trailer that's actually running is one of the few ways to add something to that page between now and release day without waiting on anything else to be finished.
This isn't a workaround or a grey area. Valve's own broadcast FAQ states plainly that games with a Coming Soon page are permitted to stream before they release - you do not need to wait for launch day to put a live feed on your store page. It's worth reading the source rather than taking our word for it: Valve's broadcast FAQ covers this directly.
The permission covers duration too. Asked how long you're allowed to stream, Valve's answer is unambiguous: "you can stream as often and as long as you want." There is no cap written into the rules forcing you to stop after some number of hours or days, which matters if the plan is to leave a feed running from the moment the Coming Soon page goes live until the day it stops being Coming Soon.
The other thing worth knowing before you set this up: Valve doesn't require a live capture of someone actually playing. Asked whether prerecorded footage is allowed on a broadcast, Valve's answer in the same FAQ is "Absolutely." That's the whole justification for looping a trailer or a gameplay reel around the clock - you're not simulating a live event, and Valve doesn't ask you to pretend otherwise.
Put the two together and that's really the whole case for a pre-launch broadcast: a video you already have, uploaded once, playing continuously, with nobody required to sit at a keyboard supervising it.
Clearing every account requirement and wiring up the right App ID gets you a broadcast slot. It doesn't guarantee Steam accepts the file you're sending it. Steam's broadcast spec is strict about the encode itself - H.264 High profile at level 4.1, a keyframe every two seconds, a constant bitrate rather than a variable one, AAC audio - and a feed that misses any one of those gets refused rather than quietly degraded. That's a separate failure mode from everything above: the account can be fully cleared and the App ID can be pointed correctly, and the stream can still never start because the video file itself doesn't match the spec.
We cover the actual numbers in video specs and encoding for Steam. It's worth checking before the Coming Soon page goes up, at the same time as the account checklist above, rather than treating the two as unrelated problems - a pre-launch broadcast that fails can be failing for either reason, and they look identical from the outside.
One detail is easy to miss and worth checking directly, because getting it wrong means the broadcast runs and does nothing for you. Valve's FAQ notes that only public streams appear on your store page - broadcasts default to Friends Only, which is fine while you're testing but invisible to the visitors you're trying to reach. If you're setting this up yourself, confirm the visibility before walking away from it. The stream key side of this is covered in getting your Steam stream key.
It's worth treating this as a checklist item rather than an assumption, precisely because a broadcast set to Friends Only will still show a green "live" indicator to you when you check it. The failure mode isn't an error message - it's a stream that's technically running and simply not visible to anyone who isn't already on your friends list, which for most developers before launch is nobody who matters.
You don't have to choose one platform. Valve's FAQ is explicit that streaming the same content to Twitch or YouTube at the same time as your Steam broadcast is allowed. If you're already pushing a trailer loop somewhere else, or planning to, there's no rule forcing you to pick between the two.
There's a practical reason this matters more before launch than after: your audience isn't concentrated on Steam yet. A Coming Soon page gets found through channels Steam doesn't control - a devlog shared on YouTube, a clip posted to Twitch, a link dropped into a Discord server. Running the same feed to all of them means whichever platform someone happens to already be on, the trailer is playing rather than sitting on a paused thumbnail, without any extra setup beyond the one Steam broadcast you've already configured.
Before touching any of this, it's worth checking whether the account doing the broadcasting is actually allowed to, because Valve's requirements here are stricter than most developers expect, and none of them are things you'd think to check if this is your first time broadcasting an unreleased game.
Valve's setup documentation for broadcasting lists four gates the account has to clear. It has to be non-limited, which on Steam means it has a purchase history of at least $5 - a fresh account created specifically for the launch, with no prior spending on it, doesn't qualify. It needs the Broadcast Live permission set in Steamworks, or membership in the Store Broadcast Beta group. It must not be Community Banned. And specifically for a game that hasn't released yet, the account needs a release-override license for that title - simply owning the app in your Steamworks account isn't enough while it's still Coming Soon, because the normal ownership check that unlocks broadcasting doesn't apply to unreleased software.
That release-override requirement is the one most likely to catch a pre-launch broadcast out, because it doesn't come up at all once a game has shipped, and most broadcast guides are written assuming the game is already out. Read the requirements directly at Valve's broadcast setup documentation rather than relying on a summary, since Steamworks group memberships and licenses are the kind of thing that can differ between accounts on the same team.
The error Valve returns when any of these gates isn't cleared - "your account does not have sufficient privileges to broadcast live streams" - is one of the most common complaints on Steam's own developer forums, and the message doesn't say which of the four requirements failed. Working through the checklist takes a few minutes. Discovering it during a livestream that's supposed to already be running does not. Confirm all four items weeks before the Coming Soon page goes up, not on the day you meant to turn the broadcast on.
Meeting the account requirements makes you eligible to broadcast. It doesn't turn a broadcast on for a specific store page - that's a separate step, and Valve documents two ways to do it: through Steam Event setup, or through the Special Settings on the store page itself. Either route ties a specific App ID to the broadcasting permission for that page, and the store page shows a feed for whichever App ID is currently configured there.
Valve's FAQ names the two most common reasons a broadcast doesn't show up on a store page even when the stream itself is live and public: the broadcasting account isn't whitelisted for that particular game, or the Broadcast App ID configured for the setup is unset or pointing at the wrong app. Both are configuration mistakes rather than technical ones - the stream can be perfectly healthy on the encoding side and still be invisible because the store page and the broadcast aren't pointed at each other correctly.
Two timing details are worth knowing if you go the Steam Event route. Changing the Broadcast App ID takes effect immediately on Valve's side, but the store page itself can lag behind before it reflects the change - if you switch which app a broadcast is tied to and the page still shows the old state a few minutes later, that's expected, not a sign something broke. And if the broadcast is attached to a scheduled event rather than left running indefinitely, Valve allows the stream to continue for up to 24 hours past the event's scheduled end time, so it doesn't cut off the instant the listed window closes.
If you're pre-launch, there's a decent chance you also have a demo live on Steam, and it's worth knowing that demo footage doesn't broadcast under its own identity. A demo has to broadcast under the base game's App ID, not the demo's own - pointing a broadcast at the demo's App ID instead is a separate misconfiguration from the two above, specific enough to unreleased games that it deserves its own explanation rather than a paragraph here. We've covered that separately in broadcasting a Steam demo.
One more thing worth planning for now rather than discovering later: Steam only keeps broadcast statistics for 30 days. Whatever the dashboard shows about a pre-launch campaign that ran for two months before release will be gone by roughly five weeks after it happened - well before you'd get around to writing up how it went. If you want a record of viewer counts from the Coming Soon period, note them down while they're still there rather than assuming they'll still be in Steamworks later. We cover what's actually available to track, and how to hold onto it, in reading your Steam broadcast statistics.
Do it before your Next Fest week starts rather than during it - see broadcasting during Steam Next Fest for what changes once real traffic shows up.
None of this requires anyone at a keyboard once it's set up. Upload the video, paste the stream key, and the feed runs from Coming Soon through launch day on its own.
Upload your trailer, paste your stream key, hit start. From $0.72/day.
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