I'm sure we're all well aware of the overwhelming doomerism surrounding the current SNF due to the record number of submissions and very obvious AI games all over the fest on the first few days.

"AI games are killing our visibility!"

"Real developers are getting completely buried!"

"This is the Slopocalypse!1!!"

Well, it's over now. This SNF, just like each prior, has ended its judgement period and has now separated the wheat from the chaff based on Steam page and demo engagement.¹ The Slopocalypse is officially over and we can now move on to our regularly scheduled programming of blaming a lack of a marketing budget or whatever on our games failures.

^\_________________________________________________________________________________________________________)

¹ Nobody knows for sure how winners are chosen. It's likely some kind of multivariate machine learning algorithm.

Was watching a recent video by Chet Faliszek (ex Valve) and he mentioned that Unity would not exist without selling ads which seemed crazy.

So I checked out Unity's Q2 2026 financial report and was mind blown.

The game engine itself only brings like 34% of their revenue. Around 66% of their revenue is from selling ads.

Many people are concerned with AI slop games, but reality is that bad games have always been a bulk of Steam Next Fest entries.

Dozens of low effort games are released every day, you just don't see them, because they don't have wishlists and never appear on the top of store that you browse.

Steam Next Fest shows all the games randomly in the first couple of days, to give hidden gems a chance.

It has a lot of AI games, but it's just the nature of things, for 1 good game there are about a hundred low effort, unplayable and slop games.

Next fest gives everyone a little bit of traffic and after few days sorts the games based on wishlists, plays and engagement, and shows good games on top.

You are suddenly seeing trash games and are disappointed, but they have always been here, you just never see them.

You should not be afraid of low effort games. They just appear and release to be banished forever, since you don't get any exposure if the game is not interesting.

Make a nice looking game with good gameplay and you will be fine. Spend time and effort on marketing, learn how to get your game out there, how to make a trailer, iterate, make better games, make more prototypes and so on.

Hey everyone!

I'm a solo developer working on my first game, Over Human, and there's something that's been driving me CRAZY lately.

Every single day I receive messages on Discord like: hey, your game looks really cool! I just wanted to ask, are you the developer behind Over Human?

Dude, my Discord nickname is literally Francesco - Over Human. You're messaging me and INSIDE my game's official Discord server I have a DEVELOPER role that literally nobody else has.

WHY ARE YOU ASKING ME IF I'M THE DEVELOPER? The weirdest thing is that it's not just one or two people, I receive DOZENS of these messages almost every single day!! Sometimes they start with "Hey, I really love your game!" or "Your project looks amazing!" and then immediately ask if I'm the person behind it. At first I was actually happy about it. I thought people were interested in my game and wanted to talk to me about development. But after receiving the exact same messages over and over again, I'm starting to wonder what the hell is going on.

Are these bots? Scammers? People trying to sell me marketing services? I'm starting to be afraid to reply. Not because I'm scared of talking to people, but because I have absolutely no idea what they want from me. I'm already spending so much time developing my game, fixing bugs, preparing the demo, managing social media, reels, interviews, articles, answering comments, and trying to get people interested in what I'm making. I really don't want to spend another hour every day talking to random accounts I don't know what they want.

I don't want to ignore genuine people either!! That's what bothers me the most. What if someone actually wants to ask me something interesting about the game, and I ignore them because their first message looks exactly like the other 50 I've received? Maybe I'm just being paranoid, but it's getting ridiculous.

Does anyone else experience this? Especially other solo developers who have started promoting their games on Reddit, Discord and other socials.

Do you actually reply to these messages? What should I do? I'm genuinely curious because I can't understand why this happens so often and I'm starting to be tired.

Thanks and sorry,

Francesco

Our game, Fugue Shot: Minigame Roguelike, launched its public demo about two months ago. As a way to increase wishlists and get players into the demo, we created a list of targeted content creators and press outlets who might be interested in covering our game.

This is a total numbers game, so we populated our list with about 400 content creators and 100 press outlets. Since it’s harder to reach large creators with a cold email, our list was mainly focused on small and medium creators.

• Small creator - under 10,000 followers
• Medium creator - 10,000-100,000 followers
• Large creator - over 100,000

We had about 2 small/medium creators for every 1 large creator on the list.

For the press list, we focused on any outlet that publishes indie game previews or reviews, as well as including some classic big outlets like IGN, Kotaku, Polygon, etc.

We emailed everyone 2 weeks before the release of our demo; that way, they would have time to create content before the launch. We crafted a pretty straightforward email that included a small pitch, some screenshots, a key, and some other important links.

Screenshot of one of the emails sent to creators

We got about 15 replies, and of those, 6 resulted in videos/shorts/streams on the game. As of today, no press outlet covered us as a result of our outreach (as far as I know). Percentage-wise, that’s a 3% reply rate and a 1.2% conversion rate. We did track 35 activated keys during the outreach period as a way to see who took interest in the game, which would bring our conversion rate to 7%.

Our biggest success was when a YouTuber with over 180,000 subscribers did a full 30-minute video on our demo, which picked up around 40,000 views. This was pretty massive and converted pretty well for us, since the YouTuber does have a very targeted roguelike audience.

Wishlist time - before August 10th (the date when we sent the emails), the game sat at 2,900 wishlists. And of August 27th, one week after demo launch, the game reached 3,900 wishlists. Though some wishlists inevitably came from our demo launch itself, there’s no doubt that the majority of these wishlists came from this outreach, since our biggest to that point came in the days following the release of the large YouTube video.

Wishlist graph after sending the emails

Here’s what we think we did well and what we could improve on in the future:

• Short and sweet, personalized emails. We don’t want to waste people’s time - if the interest is there, we don’t need to write an essay to convince them.
• Targeted list. We purposely chose creators that we felt were going to resonate with our game.
• Manual email sends to avoid spam filters from all three team members’ emails. (Note: I have no clue if this disrupted the response rate at all, but I would try to send all of them from one email that reads professionally. We did see the most responses on our one “company” email.)
• Small creators that picked up the game didn’t move the needle much. The trickle-up effect is also a numbers game, so every video is very appreciated and ultimately worth it.

The reality is that this was a cold emailing strategy. We have no connections in the creator space, so we’re pretty much just knocking on doors here. We’ll definitely be launching more coordinated outreach campaigns in the future and now we have some insight into what worked, who liked the game, and who we can target next. The goal is to build relationships with the creators that covered our game already, to see if they’d like to play it again as we push more updates and eventually release the full game!

Hope this was a helpful post for anyone in a similar spot!

TLDR: We sent emails to 400 creators and 100 press members, got picked up by one big YouTuber and several smaller ones, and got around 1,000 wishlists from the campaign.

Well, I am getting close to my goal I set a little over a year ago of interviewing 50 foundational leaders in game development & tech. 44 recorded so far including everyone from the creator of Pong to the co-founder of Blizzard. If you watch all of these, it's like a free master's course in game history, design, and business. Enjoy! Search TechJesse on YouTube if you aren't yet subscribed. Thank you!

Here are just some of the folks on the list (so far):

Michael Morhaime – Co-founder & former CEO of Blizzard

Richard Garriott – Creator of Ultima

John Romero – Co-creator of Doom

Ron Gilbert – Creator of Monkey Island

Warren Spector – Creator of Deus Ex

Roberta & Ken Williams – Co-founders of Sierra On-Line

Adrian Carmack – Artist & co-founder of id Software

Ken Silverman – Creator of the Build Engine

Hal Barwood – Creator of Indiana Jones & the Fate of Atlantis

Philip Bouchard – Creator of The Oregon Trail & Number Munchers

Brian Raffel – Co-founder of Raven Software

Scott Miller – Founder of Apogee & 3D Realms

Sandy Petersen – Designer on Doom and Quake

Al Lowe – Creator of Leisure Suit Larry

Tom Hall – Co-founder of id Software

Tom Kalinske – Former CEO of Sega of America & Mattel

Stephen Kick – CEO of NightDive Studios

Minh Le – Creator of Counter-Strike

Don Daglow – Video game pioneer

Edward Kilham – Co-designer of TIE Fighter & X-Wing

John Newcomer – Creator of Joust

Mark Turmell – Creator of NBA Jam & NFL Blitz

RJ Mical – Creator of Amiga UI & co-creator of Sinistar

David Crane – Creator of Pitfall!

Peer Schneider – Co-founder of IGN

Sean Clark – Former LucasArts game designer

Trip Hawkins – Founder of Electronic Arts & 3DO

Al Alcorn – Creator of Pong

Steven Ranck – Creator of HydroThunder

Dave Grossman – Co-creator of Monkey Island & Day of the Tentacle

Noah Falstein – Co-creator of Indiana Jones & the Fate of Atlantis

Jon St. John – The voice of Duke Nukem

David Fox – LucasArts employee number 3

+ Ed Fries (coming next week), former head of Xbox

Hey

I kinda like the idea of War Thunder but I hate everything about it except the gameplay loop.

So, I'm working on the stage of making an F-80 fly good, tuning the controls to make it fun and started a MiG-9 model on blender

Is this a crazy idea? Is there a Market for such a game?

I have a lot to learn and I'm also studying computer science so it's more of a small love project I do in my free time, for now with 2 planes..

My Desktop Dwarf is in the October Next Fest with a demo. It started with 325 wishlists, so pretty small, and I'm trying to figure out if the traffic I'm getting is normal.

Numbers from Steamworks (days in GMT, the fest started Oct 19 at 17:00 UTC, so day 1 is only about 7 hours):

• demo page visits: 92 on Oct 18, 396 on Oct 19, 781 on Oct 20
• of those, from the Next Fest page: 0, 170, 492
• the fest pages showed the game about 36k times over those two days and roughly 2.4% clicked through to the game or demo page
• new wishlists: 44 on day 1, 140 on day 2. It's at 550 now, so about +225 since the fest started
• demo players: 21 on day 1, 95 on day 2

Conversion looks ok to me. People who find it seem to like it: 184 new wishlists from about 1,700 visits to the game and demo pages (roughly 11%), and median playtime in the demo is 27 minutes. What I'm struggling with is getting enough people to see it in the first place.

I saw the How To Market A Game survey from the June fest, where games under 1k wishlists got a median of ~230 for the whole week. So after two days I'm about at that median, which sounds fine on paper. But I have no idea what's normal for traffic.

If you did Next Fest recently or during this one, can you share:

1. how many visits per day did you get from the fest page, and did it go up or down after day 3 when the hub stops being random?
2. is ~36k impressions in two days a lot or very little for a small game? what actually brought you more traffic in the second half of the week?

Happy to share more numbers if it helps anyone.

I’m new to coding in general and want to get into game dev. Any advice on what works well to start learning and what languages work well for this. Are there any websites or free courses that I should know about?

I have a full time job, how can I take part in this stuff?

Need any advice on what I might need to get the pc setup to create games. My son is really interested in the creation of games and I’m not sure what kind of software or apps I might need to get him going. Pic is of what pc setup I got. Any advice is appreciated

I am struggling a little to market my game well as it has a very minimal UI as I am trying to keep everything diegetic. (Sorta like The Sons of Forest) So I don’t even have a menu for collectibles, everything here send to the main hub where the player can interact with and the character will make a brief comment about it while still in game.

The only menu is the inventory.

Theres no combat but there a lot of depth I think in the way the player choices and non linear exploration work , I’m trying to add lots of cool dynamic encounters and details like in RDR2 but those are quite difficult to show in just screenshots or a quick gameplay trailer .

However this makes it very hard to market as all people think is that it’s a walking sim where nothing happens :(

What do you all think?

I’m working on a roguelike deckbuilder and recently started adding the first sound effects. It’s made me realize that finding individual sounds is one thing, but making them all fit together into a cohesive soundscape is something I’m struggling with.

For those who’ve worked with a sound designer, what was the experience like? How much of a difference did it make to your game, and did you feel it was worth the cost? Is there anything you wish you’d known before hiring someone?

And if you handled sound design yourself, what resources or tutorials helped you learn? I’d love to hear what worked for you.

Regular gamer here, trying to get into making games.

I've seen some insane work here and I'm curious about how you develop the judgment behind it. I'm neither a software developer nor a game designer, so I know there's a ridiculous amount to learn. Right now, I'm struggling to figure out where to put that effort.

For context, I'm making a Frutiger Aero incremental game for the web. It started as a super simple 2D browser game, something I could eventually put on CrazyGames or similar sites. It quickly evolved into a 3D game with more content, more complexity, and increasingly chunky game files. So clearly, keeping things simple is already going very well.

I'm using Godot and Blender, and relying heavily on Claude Code for the programming. The technical learning curve had always put me off trying this before, and that helped me get started. But I'm now running into the limits of my own design knowledge: being able to add something doesn't tell me whether it makes the game better.

That's the wall I'm hitting. How do you get from something that works to something that actually looks good and feels fun?

In particular, how do you decide whether a game needs more depth, or whether you should cut things back and improve what's already there? With an incremental game, I can keep thinking of things to add, but I'm less sure how to judge whether those additions are making the experience more interesting.

I'd love to hear what your creative process looks like. How do you go from an idea to testing whether the mechanics are enjoyable? How do you approach the visual direction so everything feels like it belongs in the same game? And when something feels off but you can't quite explain why, how do you work out what to change?

As an optimization freak, I'm also curious about the 80/20 of learning this stuff. Which fundamentals or exercises made the biggest difference when you were starting out? I'm happy to learn from the beginning; I'd just appreciate some direction on what to focus on first. I guess you can't shortcut your way to good taste, but you can probably get better at developing it.

Any resources, communities, or stories about what helped you get past this stage would be very welcome. Would love to connect with other people figuring it out too.

Thanks in advance, much appreciated

My game is a falling blocks game but the floor rotates. The rotation is triggered by a hard drop, and you fill in rings of blocks instead of rows to get points.

I didn't want to use the usual garbage rows approach to multiplayer so I came up with an approach where both players are playing in exactly the same space, and if your opponent places their pieces you can "steal them" by placing your blocks over the same spot, you see a ghost image of your opponent's board to know where you can steal from. Once a block is stolen it gets marked with an outline. The game basically works the same otherwise, except a "ring" of blocks will be completed with the combination of you and your opponent's blocks, not just yours.

Demo of how it looks:
https://imgur.com/a/BPOOnk8

The demo isn't final btw, just playing around with the idea. I find it fun, but I have a hard time gauging when people find stuff too hard or tedious. I'm trying to get better at that but would love your feedback and impressions.

We are working on our menus to show discovered stickers, balls, and amulets. We want everything to feel mechanical and more in-game rather than like a usual UI that feels more like digital screens.

Nothing is final yet, and this is more of a vibe check right now. What do you think? Is it clear enough? Is a game with a lot of potential content as many of the stickers or amulets are not implemented yet, so I'm not sure of the best way to show the player progress in some kind of glossary.

If you want to see some of the gameplay to get more context, here is the info about the game: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5089770/BINGONE/

Programming and modding are both skills I've always wanted to learn (if it's even possible anymore), but I'm not sure which one better benefits the other.

Programming would teach me the basics, I'd assume, but there's a huge skill floor and a lot to learn, to the point it can take decades to become competent. Modding meanwhile presumably involves having to read and understand unfamiliar and outdated code, but it feels if I can learn that I would have a better baseline to tackle programming.

I don't know anymore. I don't trust my own decisions. Which is better?

I'm building an iOS game and I've built some first-party analytics with a super simple schema and a viewer server side. It's kind of clunky, but I can get some of the insights I need. But there has to be a better way.

I don't want to track any devices, IPs, or any identifiable information. I'm just using this to tune difficulty, see where people are getting stuck, and where they quit.

Suggestions would be super welcome!

Hi r/gamedev! I'm a game developer who was lucky enough to have just landed another industry role after a few months of unemployment. It's work on a long-running MMORPG game where all of the tech has existed before I entered the studio. I would really like to put it on my portfolio, but I'm not sure what I'd put on it? At least in my last role I was there for a sizable chunk of production and have plenty I can say I contributed to.

Any suggestions/ideas would be really appreciated, thanks!

Next Fest Day 2 (already Day 3 for me in Tokyo). How's it going for everyone?

I heard on Reddit that Day1&2 are kind to new games and impressions go up easily. I got 40K+ impressions in these two days, but visits aren't great. Demo adds passed 5,000, but only about half actually played it. Curious to see what it looks like when I wake up tomorrow.

Also wondering about playtime. My game is a visual novel, and the demo's median playtime is around 30 min, which is about when you solve the case. So people are playing it through, but not for hours. How does Steam's algorithm see that?

Hello,

I will preface with an apology for a long post! I am sorry! lol

I am a disabled veteran. My life is torn apart. I can barely walk ten minutes without feeling like my spine is being pulled out from my bottom. I have neck and arm pain, the later of which causes my arms to go numb so I lose sensation and drop things. I am depressed and surviving off of my VA benefits, but I don't want a life of "just" surviving. I want to live, despite what has happened to me.

I took up cybersecurity at a local college. It was supposed to be 100% online, so they claimed. I found out it was not. I'm almost done with the semester and I do not plan on continuing. After some reflection inward, mostly after this post I made here, I started to think about what kind of "jobs" or hobbies I could even do. I boiled it down to several things I love to do: writing/reading, gaming and tech (the CS path I'm quitting). After some thinking, I thought about combining the writing with my love of gaming. I did do some Ruby scripting back in the RPG Maker 2003 days, so it isn't entirely a new field for me.

My question is: are there any online programs (bootcamps?) that could do this for me? I know, you might say "That's expensive!" but I will be using my G.I Bill or my VR&E to attend, so it would ALL be covered, including whatever equipment I need to learn and do the job. I won't be using these benefits otherwise, as I have been diagnosed completely disabled with no expectations of my injuries to heal or get better. So I just need help on determining what program will satisify those goals for me, so that I can present the options to my counselor. The goal isn't an immediate job, as I know the tech field itself is oversaturated, I am using it to learn coding + get the housing pay so that I can pay my bills, buy food and get my bus rides to doctor visists + medication.

Does anyone know of a good program for this goal? And do you know if they accept the G.I Bill and or VR&E?

Thank you kindly dear strangers,

edit

duh. forgot to say. it needs to be 100% online. lol

RIP

Thinking of getting a MacBook Pro for my main dev work, leaning towards m5 pro but not sure if m5 would be sufficient.

Want to also do some game dev on the side. My main engine has always been UE5 but happy to use Unity/Godot if they’re more suitable for Mac.

Will things go smoothly or is Mac really that bad for game dev?

Hi everyone!

I'm an indie developer preparing to release a demo for my upcoming game, Dustline 2D.

I've encountered a Steamworks bug that prevents me from completing the demo's store page.

Whenever I try to save the developer/publisher information or update the contact information on the demo's store page, Steamworks returns an HTTP 500 error. Sometimes the interface also crashes with a React error.

A few details:

• The main game's store page has already been submitted for review and approved.
• The issue only affects the demo's store page.
• I've tried different browsers and incognito mode.
• My Steamworks account has the necessary permissions.
• I've already contacted Steam Support, but haven't received a response after two days.

I'm hoping to release the demo ahead of Steam Next Fest in February 2027, but this issue is blocking me.

Has anyone experienced something similar? Is there a workaround, or do I just need to wait for Valve to fix it?

Is it possible to release a demo directly on the main game's Coming Soon page without publishing a separate demo store page?

Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks!

I'm curious how other indie developers approach playtesting.

I'm also wondering whether there's a gap in how developers help each other with this.
For example, imagine a community where developers could regularly play each other's games, provide constructive feedback, and get the same opportunity in return. Not just exchanging favors once, but creating an environment where helping someone test their game is a normal part of being involved in the community.

Of course, everyone has limited time, and simply asking people to play your game doesn't necessarily mean they'll get anything valuable out of it. So I'm curious how something like this could work in practice.

I'd be interested in building something like this myself, where we playtest each other's games and exchange feedback. I'm just not sure how to organize it so everyone benefits fairly, including getting feedback on my own games without it feeling one-sided.

I'm not pitching anything at this stage. I'm genuinely interested in hearing about your experiences and whether other developers feel there's room for a better approach.