Steam just updated the store homepage, and one huge change might seriously hurt indie devs, or not.

For years, indie devs treated the Popular Upcoming as one of the most important pre-launch visibility beats. The common wisdom was that if you could get around 7k wishlists, you had a decent shot at appearing there near launch, which could then snowball into a ton more wishlists (2-20k), which in turn would lead to more launch sales, and algorithmic visibility.

However with this new update Valve says Popular Upcoming has been updated to become "more popular" by showing "the most anticipated releases of the coming month," as opposed to what it was previously where it was chronological and showed the next games released sorted by release date with over ~7k wishlists.

So in essence this list is now a lot more weighted towards "popular" than before. Right now the game on there with fewer wishlists has 80,000! If this is an example of how things will be going forward, then it seems the old 7k wishlist benchmark is basically gone.

Honestly this seems a pretty big disaster, it feels like another "rich get richer" system. The games that already have huge audiences get even more homepage visibility, while smaller indies lose one of the few places where they could get visibility if they hit a hard (but achievable) threshold.

The good news is they added one new section, Personal Calendar, and this section basically shows you recently released games and upcoming games that match your preferences, it’s unique for every player. On this list the number of wishlists required to show up does seem to be even smaller than the previous 7k, and the games are all extremely good recommendations. Looking at my own page I am interested in every single game shown there, it's all games that I would definitely want to play.

So Popular Upcoming is gone which hurts indie devs, but the new Personal Calendar might lead people to find the games they want to play. Previously you would get mass market visibility, whereas now it is more algorithmic driven. Technically this might mean fewer wishlists but better conversion numbers, so maybe just maybe this might end up being a positive change. We will have to wait a few weeks or months to get some stats to know how this update will impact indie devs.

Either way the same marketing rules that used to apply still do. You need to market your game off Steam, you need to pick a good marketable idea with an interesting fantasy and a compelling hook. All of that remains the same, only the last tier has changed somewhat.

The Unity Asset Store Summer Sale is starting this week! As always this is one of the biggest sales of the year with thousands of the BEST assets on sale. As usual it will be 50% off the top assets, and up to 90% OFF for some Daily Deals!

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Computex 2026 just happened! This is one of the big yearly tech events where lots of stuff is announced, here are the quick highlights:

Overall the big theme is clear: gaming hardware, creator hardware, and AI hardware are all blending together. For game devs, the main things to watch are faster dev machines, and the continued rise of handheld PC gaming.

It's that time of the year again, E3 is dead but Summer Game Fest is very much alive!

The event was 2 hours long and as always it was awesome filled with tons of games in every genre imaginable.

Resident Evil Veronica kicked off the show, it's a remake of the 2000 game.

Alien Isolation 2 is finally a sequel to the very unique game from years ago, Blood Message is an awesome cinematic action adventure game with intense melee combat, TMNT: The Last Ronin is made by Platinum and takes the turtles in a new direction.

Then Guild Wars 3 was announced! I remember playing the second game when it came out, that was ages ago! Star Wars Zero Company is and awesome XCOM-like in the Star Wars universe being developed by Respawn, The Blood of Dawnwalker is all about vampires, Chronicles Medieval is a brutal medieval army combat game and Virtua Fighter Crossroads is story focused and very grounded.

The Wolf Among Us 2 is also coming! Finally continuing that story. Crossfire is a mysterious sci-fi action game, and Stellar Blade: Blood Rain looks super stylish and futuristic.

And the big game that closed the show was Final Fantasy VII: Revelation, the third and final part of the remake trilogy.

All in all this was an awesome event!

After that was the Day of the Devs event, with lots of unique, strange, and interesting games.

Factorio is finally reaching its "final" state, and this genuinely feels like the end of an era.

The devs have announced that Factorio 2.1 is planned to be the game's last major update. It will not add huge new content like new planets, enemies, research trees, or resource chains. Instead it is focused on quality of life, small features, fixes, polish, and modding improvements. After that, the devs say the focus will shift to long-term support like bug fixes, compatibility, and modding.

This one is personal for me because Factorio is one of my favorite games of all time. I first played it before it even came to Steam, and I loved it immediately. It is one of those games where I started playing and in 4 days I had put over 40 hours into it! The design is just unbelievably strong, simple idea, infinite depth, perfectly tuned progression, you start playing and suddenly it is 3 AM and the factory MUST grow!

It is also one of the most successful indie games of all time. The devs officially said it had passed 3.5 million sales by the end of 2022 and was still selling about 500,000 copies per year. Third-party estimates now put the base game around 5.9 million copies sold and roughly $166 million gross revenue, and that does not even fully account for the huge success of the Space Age DLC, which sold over 400,000 copies very quickly after launch.

So this is a massive milestone. Factorio has been in active development for over a decade, became one of the defining Steam indie games, inspired an entire factory-building genre, and now they are basically saying: "the game is done."

Honestly, that is kind of beautiful. So many games keep expanding forever until they lose focus, but Factorio feels like it is ending in the best possible way: polished, complete, endlessly replayable, and ready to stand as one of the greatest indie games ever made.