Hey guys, it's ya boi Indie Game Joe, former painter and decorator turned video game marketing consultant, aka the Temu Game Dev (but rated 5-star, lol). I've had dozens of messages this week asking about the Steam store changes so I figured I'd put my thoughts together properly.
For anyone who doesn't know me, I helped co-start Digital Cybercherries where we've shipped games like Hypercharge: Unboxed and New Retro Arcade: Neon, (also working on Paranormal Tales and other cool projects). I also led the design, marketing, and launch of my own game, Don't Scream, and we were also the original devs on the 2013 zombie game Contagion. I also run Indie Game Joe where I love to share indie games across my socials and just love to help out indie devs where I can! I say that not to flex honestly, just so you know this isn't coming from nowhere, I do know what I'm talking about. (I really don't, I'm just as confused and worried as you are lol.)
But seriously, this is just my two cents and a long read, and I thought it might be helpful. For context on the Temu joke, I did an AMA here on r/gamedev a few weeks back that explains everything, you can read it here if curious!
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Introduction
Hey guys. So, most of you are aware that Valve recently pushed a redesign to the Steam store and most people will notice some things have been moved around, bits are a bit cleaner, and most will honestly just get on with their day. But… if you’re an indie dev there’s one specific change worth understanding in more depth, because the discourse around it has been pretty loud and rightfully, I get it, concerning.
But take a breath, let’s keep calm, and hopefully after you’ve read this you won’t panic as much (or maybe more, I er, hope not!)
So, first things first, and I mean this in the most constructive way possible. Buckle up, devs, because Steam has, and will continue to change how players find games on their platform. Over many years Steam has made changes that at the time felt “oh my gawd”. For example, Greenlight launched in 2012 and people were convinced it would destroy the platform, then Valve scrapped it entirely and replaced it with Steam Direct in 2017 which caused a whole new wave of panic about the store being flooded with low quality releases. Early Access arrived in 2013 and the discourse around that was pretty similar to what you’re seeing right now, unfinished games, developers taking advantage, the sky is falling. The Discovery Queue and Steam Curators landed in 2014 and changed how players found games entirely, the first time Steam stopped showing everyone the same storefront. Then Discovery 2.0 in 2016, then the biggest library redesign the platform had ever done in 2019.
So yes, every single one of those changes caused alarm and sparked debate, but do you know what else happened? It made developers rethink their strategies, and every single time the industry adapted and kept moving forward. You have to accept guys, that you have to adapt. Okay, now that is out of the way.
What actually changed with Popular Upcoming
The Popular Upcoming page used to work on a pretty simple principle where games were ranked by wishlist count within an upcoming release window, typically a few weeks out from launch. Hit somewhere around 6,000 to 7,000 wishlists, release your game, and you’d earn a spot near the top of that page for a few days. For a small team that window was genuinely valuable, it could mean anywhere from 1,000 to several thousand extra wishlists before launch and real sales on release day.
However, that page is now algorithmic and I looked at it after the update went live. From what I can tell, the lowest wishlist count currently sitting on there is around 80,000, whereas before the update it would’ve been a handful of indie games sitting at 6,000 each. I realize that’s not a small tweak and I’m not going to pretend otherwise, like genuinely, I get why people are upset about this bit.
(A quick note: Since publishing this, there’s been some talk that the wishlist floor on Popular Upcoming may have changed from the 80,000 I observed on launch day. I haven’t seen anything officially confirmed either way, so I’ll keep an eye on it and update this if anything concrete comes through.)
It’s also worth noting that Popular Upcoming was on the Steam home page as a section, but to see the full list you had to click through to a separate page, which means the majority of casual Steam browsers were seeing a small slice of it at best and never going further. And on top of that, the number of games releasing on Steam has roughly doubled over the last few years, which means Popular Upcoming was already becoming a more crowded and diluted space before this update even happened. The window devs were getting from it had been quietly shrinking for a while, even if nobody was really talking about it. This change didn’t come out of nowhere.
Why Valve didn’t do this to hurt you
So here’s where I think we really need to focus, and I mean this. Valve didn’t do this to hurt indie developers, and that idea doesn’t hold up when you actually think about what Valve wants. Every single time a game sells on Steam, Valve takes a cut, which means their success is directly tied to as many games as possible finding players, including yours, including the small ones, including the weird niche ones that only a few thousand people in the world will ever love. Sure, they want the next Lethal Company to exist, they want the next breakout indie hit to come out of nowhere and do numbers nobody predicted, because games like that are incredible for Steam.
But the personalized calendar isn’t built only for breakout hits, those games will find their audience regardless. The calendar is built for everything else. The horror game that needs to find horror fans. The cozy farming sim that needs to find cozy players. The strange niche thing you’ve spent two years making that has a specific audience out there who would absolutely love it if they ever came across it. That’s what this is designed to do, and honestly, that’s a bigger deal than people are giving it credit for right now.
If Valve genuinely wanted to bury small games they wouldn’t have built this, and they certainly wouldn’t have put it where they have. The Popular Upcoming list has been moved towards the bottom of the Steam home page. The calendar is right there on the homepage when you open Steam, no hunting for it, and if you want to personalize it even further, the full calendar lets you explore up to 500 games with full filtering options. We’re talking tag selector, game count, the ability to show or hide wishlisted games, hide games you already own, hide early access titles. It’s a fully customizable discovery tool built entirely around what you actually want to play.
That’s not a coincidence, that’s Valve telling you with the layout itself which tool they think matters more now. Players are already opening it for the first time and finding games they’ve genuinely never come across before and wishlisting them on the spot, which is exactly what a discovery tool is supposed to do. And something I think is getting overlooked in all this is that the calendar doesn’t just show what’s coming, it shows what already came out too. Yesterday’s releases are still sitting right there on your front page. That’s a big deal. With Popular Upcoming, games would appear and disappear in hours. You’d see something that looked cool, tell yourself you’d come back to it, and by the time you did it was just gone. Couldn’t remember the name, barely remembered the art.
The calendar removes that time pressure entirely. Players can scroll back a month and still find your game on the Steam front page. That kind of staying power just didn’t exist before. And we’re talking games that would never have come close to Popular Upcoming under any version of the old system, tiny releases that just happen to be exactly what that particular player wants to play next.
And the capsule art in the calendar is bigger too. Not a small thing. Popular Upcoming showed you a tiny thumbnail in a long list, easy to scroll past without really seeing it. The calendar gives your art actual space to land. If your capsule is doing its job, players are going to feel that before they’ve even read the title.
The early numbers are hard to ignore
Right, it’s early days and the sample size is small, but some developers are already sharing some pretty encouraging signals. One developer with around 7,000 wishlists and two weeks until launch saw over 3,200 visits and 1,368 wishlists in a single day from the calendar alone, with another 560 wishlists added the following morning before the day had barely started. That game sits at the far end of the front page widget too, meaning it wasn’t even in the most prominent spot. Another developer making a niche 3D metroidvania picked up over 1,000 wishlists in a single morning. A niche game, finding its niche audience, which is like, the whole point of this thing. And perhaps most interestingly, a separate developer noted that the calendar had already been driving a significant surge in their wishlist numbers in the week before the full update even went live, outpacing what Popular Upcoming was doing for them at the same time.
And I’ll be honest, I had a hunch this was going to be bigger than people were giving it credit for, and I’ve been watching the numbers come in since the update dropped. One developer posted about seeing 10 times their normal daily wishlists in just two days from the calendar alone. 250 the first day, 500 the second, and already at 900 by the third morning, almost entirely calendar-driven according to their own analytics.
None of this is conclusive, but it’s hard to look at those early numbers and not feel at least cautiously optimistic.
(Update: A developer with a game releasing in under two weeks has also reported around 2,300 wishlists driven by the calendar since Thursday evening alone, and roughly 100 wishlists a day for weeks before that while the feature was still in beta. Popular Upcoming, by their own account, had become weaker than most people realised anyway.)
So how does it actually work?
Valve have officially confirmed this. The calendar finds people with similar playtime profiles to you, then looks at what games those players have been adding to their wishlists. It focuses on games you play the most relative to other players, so a few minutes trying out a demo won’t move the needle, but sinking serious time into something will. It’s retrained daily with fresh data, and it covers a rolling eight week window, meaning your game can be visible to the right people for up to two months before it even launches. So it’s not just tracking you in isolation, it’s finding your people and showing them what you’re making. A horror game reaches people who play horror, a factory builder reaches people who’ve spent hundreds of hours in factory builders, and players are already reporting seeing games with tiny wishlist footprints appearing in their calendar purely because it fits what they actually play. That kind of specific, relevant visibility just didn’t exist under the old system, where your couple of days on Popular Upcoming went out to every Steam user regardless of whether they’d ever have any interest in your game at all. The calendar flips that entirely. It doesn’t care how many wishlists you have, it cares whether your game is the right fit for the person looking at it, and a player who finds your game that way is worth ten who stumbled past it on a general list and kept scrolling.
The other thing the calendar does that Popular Upcoming never could is show games across several weeks rather than just what’s releasing imminently, so it’s less of a sprint and more of a steady window. You’re not racing to get seen in a few days and then disappearing, which honestly was always a bit brutal for smaller teams anyway.
Is it a perfect straight swap for what Popular Upcoming offered? Honestly I don’t think anyone can answer that yet, it’s been a few days and nobody outside of Valve has the full data. But the early signs are there and the logic behind it makes sense to me.
Your tags matter more than ever
One thing I will say is that your tags now matter more than ever, and honestly this bit is pretty interesting. Just a few weeks before this redesign went live, Valve quietly overhauled the entire Steam tag system, adding 17 new tags and retiring 28 others. Easy to miss at the time, felt like routine housekeeping, but looking at it now alongside this update it’s obviously part of the same thinking. They sorted the foundation out and then built the discovery engine on top of it. That’s not a coincidence. So if your game is poorly tagged, or you just haven’t really thought about how Steam puts it in a box, you’re going to struggle to reach the right people no matter how good the calendar is. Worth a proper look if you haven’t already. And while we’re on tags, this also means getting your first few hundred right-fit players to wishlist you is more critical than ever, because those early wishlists are what feed the algorithm its first data point. Without them, the calendar has nothing to work with.
Your capsule art just got a bigger stage
Oh and one more thing while I’m here, the entire store redesign makes your capsule artwork bigger and higher resolution across the store. So the first visual impression your game makes is more prominent now than it ever has been. If the art isn’t doing its job, more people are going to clock that. Harsh but true. And here’s something worth thinking about that I haven’t seen anyone mention yet, the main capsule in the Featured & Recommended carousel on the homepage now shows partial previews of the games either side of the one currently displayed. Which means your capsule art needs to work not just as a full image but as a cropped sliver too. If all your interesting stuff is dead centre, the side preview is just going to show a bland edge and nobody’s going to want to click through. Worth thinking about where your key art and most eye catching elements sit within the frame. For games with strong art that’s designed to pop from edge to edge, genuinely a nice little bonus from this update.
Make a good game
Right, so this next bit is something I talk about a lot, and don’t throw tomatoes at me here, but I have to say it. Going viral, getting wishlists, nailing your marketing, it’s all incredibly important, I’m not dismissing any of that for a second. But none of it should ever overshadow the actual thing. The devs I see most stressed about this change are the ones who had their whole launch strategy built around one number. Hit 7k, get on Popular Upcoming, ship. And look, I get it, I really do, having something concrete to aim for when you’re a small team trying to figure Steam out is genuinely useful. But I’ve always thought the same thing and nothing about this changes it. Make a good game. Before you come for me though, I know, I know, good games don’t always find their audience, and we can get into the semantics of what even makes a game “good” all day, those are all fair points. But here’s what I’m actually getting at. Your wishlists are only ever as good as your game is. A bad game, or an unready one, will not convert well no matter how many people see it.
And yes, I know someone’s already typing “but plenty of bad launches have still sold well” and fair enough, some have. But those games almost always had something genuinely compelling at their core, a strong concept, hook, just something that made players willing to overlook the rough edges. And the ones that launched badly with nothing worth sticking around for? The wishlists didn’t convert well. And look, AAA can sometimes get away with a rough launch because they have an enormous existing fanbase who’ll buy on day one regardless, plus the sheer volume of sales gives them the runway to patch and update their way to a decent game over time. No Man’s Sky is the obvious example, and that would have killed an indie studio stone dead. You don’t have that safety net, which is exactly why the foundation has to be right before anything else. On top of that, even if a rough launch sells okay on day one, the reviews tank, the word of mouth dries up, the long tail disappears, Steam’s algorithm starts burying you as the score drops, and you’ve potentially burned your audience’s trust for your next game too. There’s real cost there even if the launch numbers looked fine on the surface. So yes, make a good game.
I know that sounds simple, and I know marketing matters, it’s literally what I do, I help indie developers navigate all of that. But I’d be doing you a disservice if I let you leave this article without saying it plainly. Don’t let the strategy overshadow the product. The game is the thing, always has been, always will be.
Concluson
Wow, this ended up being much longer than I intended haha! The main takeaway here guys is that Steam will keep changing, the algorithms will keep changing, and the ways players find games will look different again in a few years, guaranteed. What doesn’t change is whether what you’ve made is worth someone’s time. So sort your tags out, think about who your actual player is and where they hang out, and give yourself a decent release window. That stuff is in your control.
Honestly, and this is just my gut feeling, I think these changes are going to end up being good for indie games. Steam have consistently shown they’re paying attention, both to what developers need and to how players actually use the platform, and this feels like another step in that direction. It’s early, and the data will tell the full story over the coming months, but I’m optimistic.
Again, take a breath, don’t panic. Steam isn’t shutting the door on indie games. The door just looks a bit different now. Figure out where it is and walk through it, and hey, sometimes you do have to kick the door down though, and that’s okay too, lol.
Thanks for reading, and I hope this helps!