This is an article about a pretty fresh talk that happened yesterday at a "Steam Indie Connect" event in Korea. It's a very good write-up so I recommend reading it in full but here are some notable points and quotes from the event that was worth highlighting:

Total Steam revenue in South Korea grew 126% over the past five years, with premium game and DLC revenue increasing by 70% and in-game purchase revenue surging by 388% over the same period.

On AI copycats:

Tom Giardino expressed regret, noting that this was the first time he had heard of such extortion cases. He started with Valve's underlying principle regarding new technologies. "We don't want to be gatekeepers telling developers which tools they should or shouldn't use," he said, stating that whether to use AI in development is a decision for the developers themselves.

However, he pointed out that clone games existed long before AI. Spotting an interesting concept during Next Fest and quickly making a similar game or chasing trends has always happened; AI has simply accelerated that pace.

Valve has historically not been aggressive with DRM or anti-piracy measures. Instead, it placed weight on making the legitimate version the best version available, and he explained that Valve views AI cloning through the same lens. Giardino said, "Rather than relying on a single mechanic that someone can easily copy, you need to keep growing your game by adding features, personality, and creativity that stem from your own perspective."

On "AI Slop" hitting Next Fest and its current staggering 7000+ participants:

Marc Wilkinson explained the visibility structure of Next Fest. For the first two days of the event, games are shown to players on a virtually random basis. After that, personalized recommendations kick in, surfacing more games that a player is likely to enjoy and purchase. He pointed out that many articles complaining about a flood of low-quality games were written based solely on those first two days.

He also shared the reason behind starting randomly. It is to prevent system abuse by those trying to enter early just to gain immediate visibility, and to give every game a fair share of exposure during Next Fest. "We recognize that the trade-off is some low-quality games get exposed," he said. "We are fully aware of the situation, and a significant number of people are thinking about how to solve this problem."

He also pointed out that the benchmark for success varies for each game. There are titles overjoyed to gain 10,000 wishlists during Next Fest — tripling their previous total — while others are disappointed even after gaining 50,000 because it fell short of expectations. "As platform operators, we can't define what success means for an individual game," he said, explaining that Valve chose to keep the doors open for both Next Fest and seasonal sales while continuously refining page layouts and placements.

He noted that this concern was not new. When Steam Greenlight launched around 14 years ago, developers asked if Greenlight games could be filtered out. When Steam Direct, the current self-publishing system, was introduced, requests came in for a checkbox to hide Steam Direct games. Every time, rather than turning developers away or trying to pre-filter good games from bad ones, Valve chose to improve the shopping experience.

Giardino said, "We don't think we're perfect and there's plenty of room for improvement," but added, "Rather than limiting developer access, making Steam a smarter and more dynamic platform is the starting point of our philosophy."

On Discoverability and the Personal Calendar:

He explained that this feature differs from other Steam features because it revolves around recency. While top store recommendations and top seller lists include games from years ago like 'GTA 5' or 'Tactical Breach Wizards,' the Personal Calendar is virtually the only space dedicated exclusively to brand-new releases.

Nevertheless, he noted that the Personal Calendar was designed to reach deep into the catalog. "It doesn't matter if this game is a global top seller. What matters is whether there are enough signals indicating it will be popular with you personally," he said, stating that Valve will continue to refine the feature so games can connect with their audience even if they aren't top sellers.

And surprisingly on VR:

Giardino responded, "We still believe in virtual reality." He revealed that many Steam Frame users play standard library games rather than VR titles, using the Frame as a display. He framed VR's challenge as another 'chicken-and-egg' dilemma: developers wait for a larger VR market, while players wait for more VR games.

He also spoke candidly about component costs, noting that rising prices for parts like RAM and memory increased costs for all hardware, including Valve's, despite their desire to price Steam Frame lower to attract new users. "Moments where we could have welcomed many new customers became reasons to hesitate or wait on VR," he said, adding, "We feel sorry to VR developers."

And succinctly summarized by the article writer himself:

To be sure, Valve did not present a definitive solution to the issues of AI slop and cloning. The issue of low-quality games during Next Fest remained at the stage of being acknowledged and actively considered. However, Valve drew clear lines on what it will and will not do, while highlighting areas developers can control directly. From community and updates to quality and design choices, Valve's answers ultimately pointed back to the game itself.

I hear loud murmurs that Steam is backlogged, and its uptick in unanswered support requests backs this up. I'm going on 35 days of verification crickets, and I'm quickly running out of time until my trailer is set to launch on my dream game news outlet. Given the additional 3-5 day page review, I'm really worried it'll launch with no wishlist button in sight.

So I'm dying to know: how long did you have to wait to get verified? Did you bump Steamworks, and if so, when?

I’m not asking about games that just have political themes in the story. I mean games where the mechanics, systems and structure push a worldview.

Mine is Disco Elysium.

So I’m curious:

1. Which games do this well for you?
2. Which design choices (mechanics, UI, progression, failure states, what the player can and can’t do) express the ideology best?
3. Have you seen a game whose mechanics contradicted the message it claimed to have?

I’m interested in any ideology.

EDIT: Thank you very much ! Much food for my thoughts.

Stumbled upon this repo called delirium physics , which is a rust physics sdk “inspired” by the beloved euphoria physics sdk used in games like Gta4 and RDR.

But it’s really good.. so I’m wondering if this is actually legitimately an inspired recreation or if the author somehow stole it from GTA4, the delirium testing room requires you to give it your GTA4 install location for the task settings etc. so I’m a little suspicious lol

Maybe someone out there knows more , I’m trying to determine if there are potential legal consequences by rockstar for using this if this is indeed somehow a direct stolen/reverse engineered port of euphoria, not to mention moral/ethical considerations

Might be a stupid question but oh well

im a solo indie developer currently working on a zombie themed store simulator for PC.

The game is still in development I've made some progress on the core gameplay and environment but there's still a lot of work to do before it's ready for release.

im considering launching my Steam Coming Soon page early so I can start building an audience and collecting wishlists while continuing development

However im not sure if it's the right time

I'd love to hear from developers who have already launched games on Steam.

• Is it better to publish a Steam page as early as possible or wait until the game looks more polished?
• How complete should the gameplay be before creating a Coming Soon page?
• Can launching too early negatively affect wishlist growth or player interest?
• What would you recommend focusing on first: improving the game or starting marketing?

I'm working on this project independently, so I'd really appreciate hearing about your experiences, especially if you've released a simulation or survival game.

Thanks in advance for any advice!

I had two demos in Steam Next Fest (Oct 19-26). Here are the real numbers from Steamworks, in case they help someone planning their next fest.

Pidgeon Pocket (pigeon heist game)

• Fest (8 days): 47,488 impressions, 2,587 store visits, 82 wishlists
• Week before (7 days): 3,137 impressions, 925 visits, 9 wishlists

Maneki Mania (lucky cat idle game)

• Fest (8 days): 41,416 impressions, 2,832 visits, 178 wishlists
• Week before (7 days): 1,655 impressions, 1,852 visits, 171 wishlists

So Steam did show both demos a lot more: about 15x and 25x the impressions. Pidgeon's wishlists jumped, but from a tiny base. Maneki's barely moved: roughly the same wishlists from 50% more visits.

What I did during the fest: a 24/7 broadcast on both store pages from the 22nd, and short gameplay clips on TikTok, YouTube Shorts and X.

For scale, my previous game, Tied to the Beat, has about 9,700 lifetime wishlists, so these are small numbers.

If your Next Fest went better: what actually moved the needle? Streamers, the first minute of the demo, the capsule, something else? And did anyone see a real effect from a 24/7 broadcast?

I added a reskinned jam game, packed with full sources and art/music assets. The value isn't insane but it's something at least o7

Hey everyone! I’m a solo dev working on Dough It Yourself, a cozy farming game where you run a bakery using ingredients you grow on your own farm. The Steam page has been up for about 6 months, and I finally sat down with the traffic stats. Honestly, they made me a bit worried.

The numbers (lifetime):

• ~18,700 real visits (bots excluded), 859 wishlists (~4.6% conversion)
• Around two thirds of the traffic comes from my own marketing (devlogs, Shorts, Reddit, direct links)
• Steam itself barely sends me anyone. Tag pages showed my capsule 11,300 times, but only 1.63% clicked. The Coming Soon list is at 1.86%.

So when people find the game through me, some of them wishlist it. But when they see it cold on Steam, almost nobody clicks. I want to figure out why:

• Is it the capsule art?
• The trailer?
• The store page in general?
• The tags?
• Or is the game just not that appealing?

About the capsule: after a few variations, I had someone make this one for me. I watched the whole process, hand-drawn in Krita, but it still regularly gets called AI. Without anyone needing to be nice about it, I’d really like your honest opinion: does it feel AI to you? Would a new capsule actually make a big difference, or is the problem somewhere else?

Store page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4639140/Dough_it_Yourself/

Any brutal feedback is welcome. Thank you!!

​

Hello boys and girls and everyone else,

I graduate this December with a Computer Science degree, I have a good GPA at 3.63, I've had 3 Co-ops through college, I am currently a paid student researcher (part time, minimum wage, ends at graduation), and I helped found the Game Design club at my college.

Why am I not getting even interviews? I've applied to hundreds of jobs and have gotten maybe 3 technical interviews. I've even gone to my career advisor to take a look at my portfolio, resume, and LinkedIn and they said it looks great.

Well If you need a Junior Game Designer, or Junior Game Programmer, or know of people I can reach out to, please hit me up here:

grantharvey9876@gmail.com

Also here's my portfolio: https://not-spielo.github.io/grant-portfolio/

Thanks!

I work with Kevuru Games, a game art and development studio, so I see this question from the production side. In my experience, outsourcing tends to work best when a team can define a specific need: a temporary capacity gap, a specialist skill, or a clearly scoped group of assets.

It gets harder when the brief is still evolving, ownership is unclear, or feedback arrives without a shared visual target. A useful starting point is to agree on references, technical requirements, review checkpoints, and who makes the final call.

We’ve written about different cooperation models here: https://kevurugames.com/game-development-outsourcing/

For devs who’ve worked with external artists: what made the collaboration smooth—or difficult?

Title says it all, do most game devs already have their circle of connections? Do you look on sites like Fiverr? Is there like a main pool of sound designers somewhere?

I make dark ambient fantasy music myself and want to try stepping into the world of video game sound design as a huge fantasy RPG lover. Any tips are very welcome!

Long story short, I'm from a small eu country with next no 0 real industry. We only have casino studios and I worked in the field for a few years as a 2d artist.. It was really lame and I quit ( I have started a degree in a completely different field before that and now in back to finish it ), but are wondering if I should try getting into the field properly when I finish the degree, maybe somehow working as a freelancer for companies abroad ?

Fortunately I have general skills in 3d and are familiar with the whole process more or less, I like texturing the most( I love substance designer and painter ) and are wondering if it's realistic at all to try finding gigs as a texture artist ?

I have released several games in the past, indie and AAA, and every time, during the development of the core mechanics, I found myself asking the same question: "Is this really fun?"

I can still evaluate it, but when the initial feeling of discovering the game is long gone, how do you know if it's really good or just good?

Interestingly enough, when I go back to these games several years later, it's only then that I can say: "Yep, that was actually really cool what we made."

Besides measuring with external playtests, how do you cope with this during development?

isn't the Unity Animator system mecanim underrated?, i see a lot of people blaming it online and talking about how the unity animator "sucks" or full of bugs but, for me personally i see that its so underrated and its full of useful features that if i would code it myself using c# it would be a nightmare,

features like foot IK, any state block, blend trees, sub state machines, layers and so much more other features are so good for most of small to medium indie games and Unity mecanim does its job!

I know that it can become complex with a lot of animations but sub state machines already exist for organizing a lot of complex animations by dividing them into groups.

So am I missing something or what.
anyways, Thanks for reading this!

Hi everyone,

I have a question for developers who have signed console porting agreements with publishers.

Is it standard practice to include a clause in the contract that grants the developer "view-only" access to the platform dashboards (PS, Xbox, Switch) specifically to track sales statistics?

I got tired of XNA audio's quirks: no crossfades, no ducking, silent failures at runtime. So over the past few weeks I built Duack, and I've been hardening it by dogfooding it in my own prototype, a browser-playable monster prototype on FlatRedBall2, where the mixer, context-based music and encounter ducking all run through it, on the web.

What it does:

- Config-driven (code-only) ducking and crossfades

- Playlists and per-context volumes

- No dependencies (aside from JSON for one part)

- MonoGame and KNI adapters; I patched some KNI internals so desktop functionality also works on web

- Works on FlatRedBall2 now that it moved to KNI for desktop

- Ships with skill docs, runnable samples, and a CLI that tells you which files it can't load instead of failing silently

Source: https://github.com/ultimateownsz/Duack

Install: dotnet add package Duack --version 0.1.0-preview.4

TL;DR: The title. Do you think it's possible? Do you have examples?

Hi all. I made a post on another subreddit recently with gifs of my game and asking if people understood what it was about from the gifs alone, no other context or information. My game itself is basically the gameplay of one game mashed up with the format of Balatro to turn it into a roguelike (comments about originality not needed lmao), and I included one gif of the player at the shop purchasing something and then it cuts to a level where you can see the thing they purchased in action. The reason for the post was that I had been thinking and I made a hypothesis that the first impressions a player forms at the very first glance basically determine whether they'll be interested in the game or not, and this was me testing my hypothesis. I think that this naturally requires the "show, don't tell" writing strategy- if someone can't parse what your game is about by looking at it alone, it's going to have a hard time.

Well, I thought the gif of the shop would be enough to get it across at first, but it turned out not to be. The people who replied were able to identify the first game, but not the roguelike spin. This is pretty bad, because without knowing that it's a roguelike it basically just looks like a weird clone of the first game. I don't really have a clue as to how I would actually get it across, either. All the roguelike games I can think of off the top of my head (Balatro for one, but also Slay the Spire, Cloverpit, The Binding of Isaac) don't *immediately* read as being roguelikes from a single screenshot of the game alone. Balatro looks like a weird poker game, Slay The Spire looks like a game where you do RPG combat with cards, Cloverpit looks like a really unqiue slots game, TBOI looks like a weird Zelda-like. I'm wondering now if this is just an inherent problem with the roguelike medium as a whole.

Do you all have any suggestions? Do you have anything special that you did? I'm not vehemently against the idea of telling and not showing that the game is a roguelike or anything, but I do want to know if there's a better way.

I want to make a game that uses real images for all the characters, but Im like 99% sure if I just Photoshop an image I still wouldn't be able to claim fair use, so I figure I should probably get some images that won't get me in trouble if I decide to sell my game. I already know about wiki commons, but are there any other resources you guys would recommend for getting free images?

Edit: Should clarify how I'm making the characters in case it changes anything (which it probably won't but you never know). Basically I have a picture of a person and then Photoshop whatever needs to be added/removed (so making their clothing different, changing the shape of their head a tiny bit if needed, changing hair color, ect.), and then I take the eyes, mouth, and nose of three other people to overlay on the main person's face to give them a new face since I wanted to go for an uncanny valley style

Yesterday, I launched the Steam Coming Soon page for my latest indie game, and I wanted to share what the first 24 hours have looked like as a solo developer.

So far, Steamworks shows:

- 6 wishlists

- 177 lifetime store page visits

- 139 lifetime impressions

- 39 visits classified as bot traffic

- 0 wishlist deletions

Most of the traffic arrived after the page went live, although the lifetime numbers also include some earlier visits.

I spent the launch day posting gameplay clips on TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Instagram, Reddit, Bluesky, and other platforms.

What surprised me was how difficult it is to reach people organically. Some videos barely received 30–60 views, while others reached around 200, usually with very little engagement.

It's still extremely early, and I know one day isn't enough to draw meaningful conclusions. But it has made me realize how challenging discoverability can be when you're starting without an established audience.

I'm sharing these numbers because I find other developers' real Steamworks statistics much more useful than general marketing advice.

I'll be interested to see how they develop over the next few weeks.

Thinking about building a platform for online tournaments for various games.
The idea is you can create a loby anytime and competetively. It would not contain any game logic. The game servers would still be separate and owner by the game devs. But they would integrate with the platform.

Interested to hear opinions and ideas.
It would be open source, and I know no big game would integrate.

I am creating a texture editing software and have been automating the most tedious work I do while creating game textures. I wanted to know what struggles other people have in texturing:

• What kind of textures do you work on, and which tools do you currently use?
• On your most recent project, which texture-editing task wasted the most time?
• How did you work around it, and how often does that problem come up?

I'm a senior software dev working on my first mobile game ever, I've been mostly working in Web and some desktop. AI does most of the heavy lifting for me in game dev but I wanna know much more on how my game/assets are built.

I want to learn fundamentals and architecture better to be able correct issues myself or make sure AI wont mess it up. At the same time I don't think its smart for me to spend hundreds of hours on traditional courses.

Help me out here, what should I do?

Hello, i´m a newbie here and i would like advice. Recently i decided to dedicate msyself to be a developer of videogames, but it´s kinda difficult. I´m from spain and many people recomended me to study computer engineering in the university, because it´s the base for programming, but i want to study or practise in the meantime since i won´t start until the next year. I wanted to satrt practising a bit with unreal 5 and unity and learn prgramming too, but i dont know where to start or where guides to look. First i wanted to do a carrer we have here in spain specialized in game developing, but they´re so expensive and i can´t afford any of them, so thats why i´m asking you if the career i choose is good for what i want to do, because i because I turned thirty this year and i have been always so lost in my life and now i think that i have a clear path. So that are my questions, sorry for the large text and thank you.

Personally, I would enjoy management and economy sims because the gameplay loop itself is fun. You earn money, and re-invest that money back into the business to grow and improve it. Maybe strive towards some kind of high score rating of some kind.

But recently I'm noticing a weird trend in indie management sims, where they also add some kind of "personal" gain from the money earned from the business: buying a big house, an expensive car, investing in stocks or whatever, and even gambling it away.

To me this feels weird and kinda cringe. But since I'm developing a management sim myself, I want to pose the question: do people actually find interest in these "personal" gain usages for money earned in a management sim? Do you find these enjoyable?

Hi!! I’m hoping to release a passion project / code learning project on Steam in a few weeks. I submitted a build of my game for review 8 days ago, and they still haven’t gotten back to me. They say to allow up to 7 days for review, so I’m now like officially worried and I don’t know what’s happening.