I’m currently heads down, bums up in gearing up for a release of my game on steam. One of the many decisions that need to be made revolves around what date to to release on. There are a few factors to keep in mind when choosing a release date.
First things first you should obviously allow for anytime to complete all the remaining tasks in your checklist (I’m using Trello for this and it’s magic). Once you’ve come up with an approximate date check out the ‘Coming Soon’ section in Steam. This should give you the upcoming games for your chosen date, make sure there’s not any similar titles going live around this date as it may add unnecessary competition for press. Speaking of press, that should be another consideration, generally Saturday and Sunday are relatively quite days for game articles. So I’d recommended choosing a day early in the week (depending on your time zone you may have to adjust this a bit).
The other thing to avoid releasing in (unless you have a massive following) is the major sales. These change the layout of steam and the visibility of the game may be obscured.
I chose the 1st of September for the release of iZBOT which is a Tuesday. There wasn’t any other similar games around that time, although there is a major release happening at that time.
Good luck with your release!
EDIT: OK, so choosing to release on the same day as TWO AAA games in hindsight probably wasn’t the best strategy. I was thinking that the additional traffic would be a bonus and seeing iZBOT next to those titles might give it a bit of a boost, but this is offset by the fact that they are guaranteed to take up at least a couple of the popular new release slots which pushes you down the list.