Being an indie developer is a very tough job. The success rate is low and the risk is high, which means as an indie dev you probably should try to minimize risk as much as possible.

There are many ways to minimize risk, one of the main ones is simply choosing to make a game in a hot genre. That's why I don't recommend you make 2D Platformers, they don't sell well and instead I recommend you make more Steam-friendly genres that millions of players want to play, like Simulators, Incrementals, Friendslop.

And now there is a new-ish genre that is popping off and is also really great for indie devs. The Tidy Up genre.

Part of what got me looking into this topic is because last week I was doing my research for my Top 10 New Games videos that I do every month, for those I research maybe 200 games and pick 10 interesting ones. And I noticed how there were about 5 games in this Tidy Up genre that launched this month and did quite well.

This genre is all about starting off with a mountain of objects, all of them placed randomly on the floor, and the player has to manually clean it all up and sort everything.

This is an EXCELLENT genre for indie devs for several reasons.

Like I said this month I found about 5 games in this genre which made me curious as to why suddenly so many games in this genre came out. Technically this "genre" started many years ago with Unpacking, but now it seems like it suddenly is blowing up. And I think the answer is because of Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library. That game came out in late April and found tons of success, around $7.8 million. When that hit I'm guessing a ton of developers thought about making games in this genre, and now 4 months later they are publishing their games. That's exactly the timeframe that I estimate would take to make a game like this so I think this is what happened.

Now my only question is how long will this genre last? Will it last 1-2 years like Incrementals, or will it die off quickly?

I don't know the answer but usually people tend to underestimate genre lifetime. Usually indie devs tend of overestimate just how saturated a genre is. I still see comments almost every day saying the Incremental and Simulator genres are completely saturated, and yet every month when I do my research I find more and more hits in those genres.

Yes there's more and more games, but the audience is massive. So if I had to guess I would assume the same thing for this genre, it will likely peak (or has peaked) but afterwards will likely remain a solid genre for indie devs. Even if the average sales numbers go down, it will still be a great genre because of the reasons I mentioned above.

So if you're thinking of what game you could make next, then perhaps give this genre a look.

The latest Unity sale is all about Fresh New Assets! These are assets that came out recently so you probably don’t yet own them. If you regularly follow my Top 10 Lists that I do every month and you have some things wishlisted they might be on sale right now.

There’s lots of awesome tools (like Asset Inventory 4) some awesome VFX, lots of visuals, animations, and more.

Browse everything on sale HERE!

The Publisher of the Week this time is IL.ranch, publisher with a lot of cyberpunk and sci-fi assets.

Get the FREE Fog City (Mega Bubble) - cyberpunk which is a really cool dystopian cyberpunk city block.

Get it HERE and use coupon ILRANCH2026 at checkout to get it for FREE!

If you’re looking for a bundle of awesome assets then this Humble Bundle is for you!

It’s got a ton of packs from Maksim who makes some absolutely excellent models and animations.

You’ve got basically every theme imaginable, there’s Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Realistic, Gangster, Zombie, etc. Both tons of character packs and a ton of awesome first person animation packs! If you want to make first person shooters then don’t miss this bundle 98% OFF!

Get it HERE!

NVIDIA recently unveiled DLSS5 which is the latest version of their neural rendering tech that makes your games look supposedly much better while also running much faster. In the beginning DLSS was genuinely awesome tech, it was the only way to run a game at 4K with decent framerate. But over the years they've made it more and more generative to the point where it basically removes all the art direction from the game and just makes it look like generic realistic slop.

Technically the tech can look very good, but it's very much up to the developer to tweak the settings correctly. When the defaults are used it just looks terrible.

In contrast, some indie developers of awesome games have started posting "No DLSS5. Just good art direction" along with clips of their games to showcase just how important art direction is, and how it's NOT all about hyper realism.

The game REPLACED is one of the most gorgeous games I've ever seen, absolutely excellent art direction with perfect pixel art. Or ReStory: Chill Electronics Repairs also looks extremely good with stylized graphics but realistic models.