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.

GAME DEVELOPERS ARE OFFICIALLY COOKED this guy vibe coded a full pixel pirate sailing game that runs in the browser with opus 4.8 you sail a ship, engage in naval combat, explore the open sea, and interact with other ships works on mobile too a few years ago this would have been a full indie studio project with a team of artists, a sound designer, and 6 months of development now it's one person with claude code and a weekend game studios charging $40 for pixel art games while vibecoders are shipping them for free in the browser the barrier to making real games is completely gone

NEW: Leia Organa arrives at Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge at Disneyland on April 29.