Andras Illes

Steam just made a change that's really gonna hurt future indie games. The Popular Upcoming page used to list games chronologically by release time. As long as you had enough wishlists to make the cut (~6k to 7k), you'd get some time at the top of the list for people to discover your game. Now it's listed algorithmically, with far more large games from major companies and publishers on the list, even those releasing two weeks away. The lowest wishlist count on there right now is 80k, when before it would've been 10 indie games as low as 6k wishlists. Feeling very lucky our game's early access release barely made it out before this changed. It was worth probably 1k wishlists for us, and we had some really unfortunate timing/positioning too. It can be worth thousands of wishlists and sales for smaller games. Steam is more heavily prioritizing larger games, with the budget and time to grow to enormous wishlist totals, or the rare indie viral hit. The small to mid-sized games just lost a way to find players. Steam players lost a tool to discover cool smaller games.