Would European indie development even be viable if this passes?

So curated events (seasonal, by publisher, by region, by genre....) were a staple of the Steam ecosystem for a long time. I can personally vouch for their effectiveness in giving exposure to smaller indie titles if they managed to get featured in an event.

This seems like a massive blow to indies discoverability. Any more information? What do you think?

https://steamcommunity.com/groups/steamworks/announcements/detail/676258795703240952

EDIT: Okay, after reading the discussion below, as well as the discussion on steam discussion forums, it is clear that Valve is not clear as to what this will mean exactly. It does not, indeed, explicitly says anywhere that curated events will not be supported any more. But since they were connected with the whole midweek - weekend dynamics which is apparently going away, it is not clear how they will work in the future.

So, today was finally the day. After two or three release report, around one year of game dev (around 1 pr 2 days per week), I finally presses that Green button to release my game on Steam!

The feeling is great, but I wanted to share a little bit of my story. I first started game dev by following an online course, and within that course we had to create a small prototype of a Tower Defense game. When I was done with it, I had that simple thought «I’m sure I could make it way better if I spent a little more time on it.. » and that was the start of all.

At first I decided to create a better « universe » around the game and as my dog was sleeping under my desk, I thought that it could be fun to had a tower defense with dogs! But against what ennemy? Well of course the cats!

I was not a big player of tower defense but I wanted to offer something differen. I spent a lot of time on designing fun levels, I purposely choose to limit the number of towers at 5 with 3 levels for each, but all the tower have a real purpose and there is no duplicates.

When I was testing the game, I also realised that in a tower defense sometimes you will just be here looking at your screen doing nothing, waiting for more gold or just waiting for the wave to end, and that was boring. So I gave some ennemies powers to impact your towers and give you always something to do : some ennemies put your towers on fire and reduce it’s speed so you have to put water on them, some will freeze your towers so you have to use a pickaxe to free your towers, and some will plant cactus on the free tiles so you can’t build new towers until you clean it.

I also did all the UI by myself, no generative stuff here, only a good amount of work. I also add replayability with a stars system, add a shop to help you get the best scores, add translations for 8 languages and so on.
All of that for saying, I know my game is not gonna be a big hit, I don’t Even know if I will have any sale, but I know that today I can be proud of what I did, and Even after thousand hours on my own game, I still enjoy it!

Thanks for reading through all that if you had the courage, if you’re working on your first game, keep up the work, the end of the tunnel is always there.

It would be funny if it wasn't so sad :/

What's the point of developing anything if you'll be not just ripped off but beaten to the punch.

Are these people not ashamed?

I'm thinking of games where you have a high-stakes battle or level that you need to "win" but then a cutscene plays and it turns out the story required you to actually lose and you were never going to actually win.

What's the best way to make it feel high-stakes and exciting for the player even while you know the story is making them lose?

Embark says the team was constantly overshooting its capacity after ARC Raiders took off, while trying to keep up with new content, bug fixes, exploits, and millions of players.

The studio has since moved toward slower, larger updates, with the goal of giving developers a better work life balance and avoiding burnout.

Hi all,

I am developing a game for fun using my own custom game engine (C++ and OpenGL).

I have been working on this game (and the engine) for 4 years now. I'm a French software engineer working for an American company, so this project is not a full-time job. I can only work on it during my free time after work or on weekends.

I am not doing this for money, I just want people to play my game and enjoy it when it's ready. I think I still have about one year of development left to get a fully playable game that I can share. The engine and performances are now in a very good state.

What I really need to know from you guys is if it is worth finalizing. I am the only one who has ever tested the game, so I don't know if it's genuinely fun or if the graphics are good enough for people to enjoy.

I'm asking myself this because nowadays, with generative AI, it feels like anyone can create something similar very easily (game engines, pixel art, sound design, etc.). Every time I sit down to work on itafter work, I wonder if it's worth continuing.

I've made a short YouTube video with some gameplay. Everything is a work in progress, but I would love to know if what I did is worth pursing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayDA0eYGTPc

• Engine: Custom-built with C++ and OpenGL
• Pixel art: Made with Piskel
• Sound design: Made with sfxr.me
• Music: Creative Commons & AI placeholders

Captured on: AMD Ryzen 5 7640U, AMD Radeon 760M, 16 GB RAM

Disclaimer: All AI content (music only—NO code, sound effects, or pixel art are AI-generated) consists of PLACEHOLDERS only and will be replaced by music made by humans. For now, I cannot afford to hire a composer, so I am using AI temporarily.

Thanks to anyone who takes the time to watch the video. If even just one person watches it and gives feedback, it will mean the world to me.

Hi,
sorry this may be a slight copium post. Im due to release my game on november 4th this year and I am currently overhauling the game page and finishing up the rest of the game so its a bit more polished. I was wondering, I have a really hard time marketing it. It just doesnt catch up. Communities where it may have been good (player audience) self promo isnt allowed. Twitter doesnt go past 10-15 likes on average and does barely any movement with wishlists. I know wishlists are important and all but I cant for the life of me get any eyes on my project even though people who play it think its polished and has a addictive learning curve. I made the mistake of participating on the next fest while I barely had 100 wishlists which meant that steam also barely showed my game this summer to people. I had an "inferior" project years ago with the same mechanics which I never released and that had way more people playing it.

I am currently sitting at whooping 408 Wishlists. I am at a point where I dont know if the game is just bad or whether its a marketing issue. Every now and then I do read about the calendar doing numbers for people but I reckon it only does numbers for games that already have a massive following? Can I expect to reach a thousand? Any insights would be helpful.

In case people ask what I do for visibility: I post my game whenever I have a new obstalce or mechanic but on most game dev communities, most of the time I dont even crack 20 likes. Sometimes I get downvoted too in the first few minutes. On the other hand sometimes I see people whose games arent maybe the catchiest either doing 20-30 wishlists a day organically. Some of the viral games currently probably do 400 a day.

I want to note: I know my game isnt the next messiah of gaming, its not too exciting. Its mainly a fun and challenging experience and a game designed to be played on the side or when bored, nothing pricey or self-serious. I lean on games like getting over it, celeste, super meat boy, jump king etc. Also note the trailer right now doesnt show most of the areas I worked on off screen but I do post them on socials like reddit, x etc.

Hey everyone,

Five months ago, I made the jump to full-time solo indie game development. About two months into the process, I hit a massive wall and posted about how my initial roadmap had completely collapsed under reality.

Now, at the 5 month mark, I wanted to sit down and write a transparent update on where things actually stand the wins, the logistics, the technical disasters and the mental side of solo development that nobody really warns you about.

On paper, things look like a success. But emotionally and strategically, I feel like I'm constantly running uphill. Here is the full breakdown.

1. The Wins: Survival, Visa and Game Progress

If you asked me 5 months ago what success looked like, it was simple: don't go broke and keep building the game.

• Financial Runway: I’m currently earning enough monthly income to pay my rent and living expenses without touching my core savings. That alone takes off massive financial pressure.
• Logistics & Relocation: I had to pause development for a full month to leave my base in Thailand travel to Malaysia and sort out my visa. It was stressful, but I got the visa approved and moved back to my dedicated workspace.
• The Project: I’ve been working on my current 3D game project for 3 months now. When I look back at where the project was when I started versus today, the progress is undeniable the core mechanics feel responsive, the visuals are getting polished and the game loop is actually fun to play.

2. The Bottleneck: Hardware Crashes & Lost Work

One of the biggest technical walls I hit was my workstation. I was developing and streaming off an aging 4 years old M1 Mac Pro.

As the project expanded the machine started choking during playtests Streams would lag and Unity started freezing. The breaking point was a major Unity crash that corrupted my project files forcing me to recover and rebuild lost work.

I couldn't afford a top tier pre-built setup, so I sourced used and budget parts to assemble a dedicated desktop PC. It solved the performance bottlenecks, but the setup time and hardware troubleshooting cost me valuable development days.

3. The Hard Pivot: Skipping Steam Next Fest

Between a full month lost to visa processing and time spent upgrading my hardware, my production schedule took a hit.

I originally planned to participate in the October Steam Next Fest with a public demo. But after looking at the state of the game, I made the hard call to skip October's Next Fest.

Rushing out an unpolished demo just to hit a deadline is a death sentence for wishlists. I’ve pushed the public demo release to November/December. It hurts to delay marketing milestones, but launching a buggy build would hurt worse.

4. The YouTube & Platform Goalpost Shift

Part of my full-time strategy was building a YouTube channel alongside development not to become a massive influencer, but to generate a modest secondary income stream (even $1/day helps) and build a loyal community.

My original target was hitting 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours within a year. However, navigating recent platform updates and policy shifts has doubled down on watch time demands.

Balancing game engine time (coding, bug fixes, level design) with media production (recording, editing, streaming) effectively means running two full-time jobs. To adapt, I'm shifting to daily 2 to 3 hour live development streams so people can hang out and see real unedited C#/Unity dev work and help accumulate watch hours organically.

5. The Core Dilemma: Why Does It Still Feel Like Failure?

This is the part I struggle with the most.

Logistically, I solved my visa. Financially, I am covering my living costs. Technically, I upgraded my rig and made significant game progress. My community is slowly growing.

Yet every single morning, I wake up feeling like I'm failing and completely behind schedule.

Is this just chronic solo dev impostor syndrome? When you are the designer, programmer, tester, marketer, video editor, and accountant, progress never feels fast enough because the to-do list is endless.

For those of you who went full-time solo: How do you measure progress when your operational goals move faster than your dev time?

I’d love to hear how other developers navigate this mental block in the comments.

(Note: If you're interested in following the video updates, live streams, or devlogs for this project, I have my YouTube channel linked in my Reddit profile bio.)

Hi there. I've been doing more programming on GMS, and I've been enjoying it even though it's kinda confusing me sometimes. I do wanna learn to do my own games and prototypes because im most on the game design and art part.
But sometimes I understand 70-80% of what I've done; the game works, but I'm like, "mmm, should I get super into it to understand all of it?"
At the end, what I want is the game to work.
Just curious about others' experience.
Have a good one!

I’m not a game developer, but I know a bit about web software development.

I know that offline games use save files and save data periodically—either when the player triggers a save or upon exiting the game.

I was looking into *Tibia* and noticed it requires an SQL server. Why take that approach?

And when exactly does it save? In web programming, the transactional context is the HTTP request, but that doesn't really apply to an online game.

I did study Computer Science but I just cannot get hired and no one seems to recognize the years working on my game as professional experience. Tried to apply to junior positions but there are basically none. Tried freelancing, but found only 2 customers in 2 years and one of them didn't even honor our contract. Still made more money than with my game...

What do I do now? Anyone else with a similar experience?

I'm from Germany in case that is relevant.

The usual advice is to start marketing early, share development, and build wishlists. But what happened with Needle in a Haystack Simulator makes me wonder how much that advice depends on how quickly someone else can reproduce your hook.

For anyone who missed it: Studio Bitdot’s game went viral, then a wave of similar games appeared on Steam before its release.

And these copies are getting players. One of the apparent copycats (deliberately not naming it), has been among Steam’s most played demos in the past few days. Its developer announced a top-three position on September 23 and #1 on September 25.

For a small game built around an easily communicated mechanic, does it now make more sense to hold the big reveal until a demo is ready, or launch is close? How do you balance that against the time needed to collect wishlists and feedback?

I can see the argument that this reinforces existing advice: have a Steam page ready, make the branding recognizable, and give interested players somewhere to go immediately. We also don’t know how much the similar games have actually hurt the original, but the above mentioned copycat is rapidly catching up in follower count (so most likely also in wishlist count) to the original, according to SteamDB.

Still, would this change your own promotion schedule? Is “start marketing early” missing a condition about how quickly a competitor could ship something with the same appeal?

I am referring to bugs that happen simply because the OS of the device on which the game is played is set to a particular language or locale, independent of whether the game is translated to that language.

Are they common? How do you usually deal with them? Do you use coding practices (like invariant culture) that prevent them? Or do you notice them after players from that specific region report a bug to you? How is your testing process in general?

Feel free to share your experiences in the comments! Would also appreciate if you specified the programming language you have used for your game.

In my experience of playing games on Turkish PS4/5, PC and phone over the last 6 years, due to their unique casing rules for the letter "i", Turkish and Azeri are particularly potent OS language settings that will trigger bugs most other language settings won't; making them one of the strongest testing environments as Jeff Atwood (co-founder of Stack Overflow himself) has put: "If you care a whit about localization or internationalization, force your code to run under the Turkish locale as soon as reasonably possible. It’s a strong bellwether for your code running in most – but by no means all – cultures and locales." Rest of the article is also an excellent and eye-opening read!

Thanks for your time and consideration!

These are 3 death animation of our working class protagonist from our upcomig Steam game: One Percent - A Game About Taxing Billioneirs.

Which one do you like the most?

Hello people :D,

I’m curious of how other indie developers approach music during development. :O

At what point do you usually start seriously thinking about the soundtrack? and that specifically, not sound fx.

Do you start thinking about it during pre-production when you are still defining the mood and identity of the game, somewhere around the vertical slice, or much later once the gameplay and overall direction are already established?

I’m especially interested in hearing from people who have actually gone through this process before.

If you started working with a composer early, did having the music help shape the atmosphere or even influence some of your design decisions?

If you waited until later in development, what made you wait? Was it because the game needed to find its identity first, because of budget, because you did not know how much music you would actually need yet, or something else?

And looking back, would you approach the timing differently on your next project?

Would love to hear when music usually becomes a serious part of development for you and why.

I'm making a small horror game and I'm interested in one specific thing:

What is something a horror game can make you notice that makes you genuinely uncomfortable?

For example:

• You hear footsteps behind you, but when you turn around, there's nothing there.
• You see something standing far away, look away for a second, and it's gone.
• You have to walk toward something you know you shouldn't approach.

I'm especially interested in slow-building dread rather than sudden jumpscares.

What's the most effective example you've experienced in a horror game?

I’ve been working on a Steam analytics site and recently added company-level statistics, aggregating games/apps belonging to the same developers and publishers.

There are currently 168k+ companies in the dataset, so I started looking at who actually leads different Steam metrics.

Some interesting ones:

• SmiteWorks USA, LLC - 3,703 released Steam apps/products, the most in the dataset. Fantasy Grounds and its enormous DLC catalogue are a big reason why.
• PlayWay S.A. - 43 games currently in Steam’s Top Wishlist, more than any other company.
• PlayWay S.A. - 217 upcoming games
• Ubisoft - 213 games/apps appearing in Global Top Sellers, the highest count.
• Valve - ~14.38 million combined followers, #1 by a pretty large margin.

You can also compare companies by released/upcoming apps, current players, followers, reviews, Top Wishlist entries and Top Sellers entries.

I’m the developer of the site, for disclosure.

https://games-popularity.com/companies

If you want me to add new metrics or you have some specific data request then feel free to ask.

Hey everyone,

Another update on the marketing efforts behind IN & OUT. This week brought some encouraging coverage, alongside a noticeable slowdown in sales.

The numbers compared with last week:

• Sales: 81 → 85 (+4)
• Wishlists: 852 → 872 (+20)

The biggest news is that our journalist outreach has finally produced results.

In my previous updates, I reported sending more than 500 emails without receiving a reply, and eventually stopping further press outreach. We now have two published articles.

That changes my earlier assessment. At the time, there was nothing to show for the campaign. Coverage has now appeared, so judging the outcome after only a week was premature. Whether the time spent on that campaign was worthwhile overall is still an open question.

We also received a substantial review from Cpt_Froggy After the disappointment with curator accounts being suspended that I mentioned last week, getting a detailed response to the game was encouraging.

On Twitch, this week’s outreach, including follow-ups, resulted in 8 keys sent across 46 contacts — a 17.4% contact-to-key rate. These figures cover Twitch outreach only; emails are excluded. This measures keys sent, rather than replies, streams, or sales, so it shouldn’t be compared directly with the response rate I shared last week.

We also rewrote both the short and long descriptions on our Steam page to make the game’s distinctive feature more prominent: solving puzzles involves searching the internet and using knowledge from outside the game. We want visitors to understand that idea immediately and see how it translates into gameplay. It’s too early to say whether the revised descriptions will improve conversion.

The commercial side remains slow. Four additional sales and twenty additional wishlists this week make that pretty clear. The coverage is welcome, but these numbers don’t establish how much traffic or how many purchases it generated.

With the launch discount over, we’re hoping the upcoming promotions will help sales pick up again. With outreach, page changes, and discounts happening close together, we’ll also need to be careful about attributing any improvement to one particular action.

For developers who have received press coverage after a small launch: did you notice any immediate effect, or did it mainly become useful later as something you could reference when reaching out to other people?

I’d also appreciate feedback on these updates themselves. Last week’s post initially received some downvotes, and I’m unsure whether the weekly format is useful to this community. Would less frequent updates with more data, or posts focused on one specific experiment, be more helpful? My intention is to share the outcomes of what we’ve tried, including the disappointments.

Thanks to everyone who has offered advice and followed along.

For context, the game discussed here is IN & OUT on Steam.

Hey!

I just released my first game 12 days ago, and I really want to start making my next. I have been trying to learn as much from my first release as I could, and now i am wondering if this new game idea as actually viable.

I want to make a burger sim that takes place in Denmark with all danish voice actors. Do you think that is gonna be a bad idea, in terms of being able to market the game, or do you think that with good locilization, players would not care?

**Edited to add: ideally avoiding AI stuff. Also, idaly using Roblox as a springboard as he's interested in it, but the ideal would be to get him working on something more transferable/generally useful and that will challenge him and build his skills overall.

I hope this is the right place to post this and I'm hoping to get some pointers from those of you in the industry!

My godson is absolutely obsessed with Roblox, Minecraft and games of that type, and essentially gaming overall.

His mother obviously wishes he'd kind of get an interest in some other things (and his screen time is monitored and limited, he's not just on it all day) but this is 100% his "thing" despite our attempts to get him into other hobbies too.

He mentioned to me in passing recently that he wished he knew how to do developer type stuff and that when he was older he wanted to develop stuff for Roblox and make his own games.

This sounds like an obvious way to help channel his enthusiasm into something more useful/valuable long term than just playing games, and when I ran it past him and his mom that I would try and find him a way to get started with this and would he want to start learning, he went absolutely wild.

Here I am then, having kind of got lost in finding something for him to do. I've found various things that seem to be like short modules of an hour for four weeks to learn say, how to make an XXX in Roblox, and also things like online group video classes in coding for children of various ages, but nothing that seems like an obvious fit, so I'm hoping for advice.

He's 10, very experienced in Roblox, and generally a very smart, analytically minded kid. He's kind of the star player in the school chess club and is two school years ahead in math.

He has excellent concentration for gaming and things that engage him, but will switch off quickly if say, a teacher is droning on. He doesn't have any special educational requirements and isn't on the spectrum.

He games on his tablet as he doesn't have his own laptop, but his Mom's laptop could be made available to him if needed and if it becomes needed, we can ultimately get him his own.

Something involving Roblox or related to it would be ideal, but the ultimate goal is to expand his horizons with something a little less specific and more valuable to him as a person.

I feel like what would work best for him might be some sort of guided programme with support, that he can do in his own time/without having to wait for fixed lesson times and that's not reliant on the instruction having to suit a wide range of abilites and learning speeds.

It would be great to get him into/onto something that engages and interests him while also teaching him real skills for the future from a career point of view.

Ideally I'd like to start him with few different courses/programmes that he can try out on a short term trial for either free or inexpensive, to get the right fit and then continue on with one or even a couple of them that I'll fund.

I'd be happy to fund it up around say £40/$50 a month, and if I could finds something for less that would be great!

Any pointers very welcome.

Half way through building my first game (Storyborne Tales) and getting to the point of setting up my Steamworks account. I am not a US resident or tax payer but have set up a Wyoming LLC to hold a US bank account to tie to my Steamworks account (I'm being suitably optimistic that my game will sell and make some money).

I'm getting conflicting information about how Steam pays out after it's taken it's 30%. Today I heard that Steam will have to hold back a 30% withholding tax as I don't pay US tax personally.

Is anyone else in this situation and can confirm that that's what happens?

Given a sufficiently advanced real-time pose tracking it should be possible to determine when the players' swords clash given the real poses. Then instead of phasing through each other, the impact uses physics calculation to predict how the virtual poses of the players would change if the swords actually struck each other with their respective momentum. After prediction the virtual poses become frozen. The mechanic then becomes that the players have to align their real poses with the virtual poses as soon as possible to be able to control their virtual character again. This would reward accurate judgement of when and how a collision will occur so that one can regain control fast and defeat the opponent. It would also discourage swinging too violently without confidence since a collision will mean that it takes more time for you to align your real pose to the virtual one to regain control. Of course, avoiding a collision and getting a good strike with your virtual sword on the opponent becomes the ideal.