[Sohcahtoa82]

> On the other hand, ~50 brand new games release on Steam every day and a lot of them are gonna be first-time releases from amateurs for whom the level of quality & polish achievable with a small team & publisher support is just out of reach.

I'd wager a lot of them are money grabs from someone who followed a tutorial on how to make a certain type of game in Unity, swapped a few assets, and put it out there hoping to make a few dollars?

[shortrounddev2]

Yes but it's difficult to distinguish your game from theirs in the search results. It's not like people play a demo of every game and then buy the best one

[GoofGarage]

Someone on YouTube recently looked at exactly what those 50 games are. She tried to give all the ones she bought (she looked at most of the 50 in the store) a fair shake, tried to "find the fun" and give it an honest assessment while trying to at least get a laugh out of it.

Video here (fun watch!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6_qbe26m9E

-- -----

Though I'll summarize what she played that was released on August 4th, 2025, of what she chose to buy:

* "The Last Mage" was a game produced very cheaply by apparently a lone gal (the videographer found the dev diary) that was a fan of K-pop, levered heavily on existing assets, to produce a campy idea as best she could.

* "You Suck at Football" levered existing "viral game" ideas like "Only Up". Very much someone's early attempts.

* "Velocity Racing 1000" was a racing game that appeared like someone's early attempts. Very wonky controls and physics.

* "Potato Cop" is a simple action game in an deliberately "amateur style", likely produced very quickly and cheaply. She had fun with it though.

* "Escape from Amazonia" is an horror game with a quirky plot premise that did elicit some actual screams. Again, produced very quickly and cheaply, but she had some fun with it.

* "Descent" was a horror game with some genuine attempts on the presentation side, and again elicited some screams. Some clear effort there. Someone was on to something with this one, and it's a shame they didn't refine it further.

* "Agu" is a crude, early access, challenging platformer. This won't go anywhere, but the videographer made the best of it and had some fun with the sheer difficulty of overcoming the physics.

* "Bee Simulator: The Hive" had some FANTASTIC presentation and assets. Localized for 14 languages. Great voiceover. Somewhat educational. It's apparently a re-release of a previous game which is why it has poor reviews. Some quirks and bugs, but some might really enjoy it.

-- -----

So are you really "competing" with 50 other games if you put out something extremely high quality and polished? No. You might be competing with 5... at most. If you put out a genuine banger and took the time to market it in advance, you should get noticed.

Steam's algorithms clearly are doing a good job and ensuring most of this stuff isn't getting much visibility outside of release. Though it's there to find if you deliberately look to unearth all of it.

[Sohcahtoa82]

> If you put out a genuine banger and took the time to market it in advance, you should get noticed.

The emphasized part of this quote is probably far more important than you give credit for.

I imagine a lot of solo game devs simply don't have the money to pay for marketing, and with many communities having rules against self-promotion, combined with the latest Discord phishing scam being "Hey can you try my game?" and delivering a trojan, it can be hard to get your game in front of people. Even if you're in a community for game devs, most of members are there to get people to play their game, not someone looking for a game to try.

I bet there are some real diamonds out there, hidden in obscurity, lost in the landfill of early attempts at making a game.

[ThrowawayR2]

Even if a prospective developer were competing with only a single quality indie game release per day, that's 365 games per year, every year and people generally don't finish any given game in a day. The odds are still stacked quite heavily against them.

[deadbabe]

Only if it’s in the same genre.