It feels like Steam is always changing. Every month there is some “hot new genre” rendering the game you are making completely out of date. But is that actually true? For a sanity check, I bought a 1993 edition of Computer Gaming World magazine just to remind myself of where Continue Reading
How many games were released in 2025?
It is January so it is time for journalists to look up how many games were released last year and say “Too many games. Steam is oversaturated, <x> number of games released this year and most games got 0 visibility.” Here are the examples from last year So this is Continue Reading
2026 Games of the year
I have interviewed lots of very successful devs who have achieved the indie dream of releasing a hit game that earned the respect of gamers worldwide and more importantly made an ungodly sum of money that means they never have to work again. One striking habit I see over and Continue Reading
Leftover research from 2025
The way I write the HowToMarketAGame blog is that I have this google doc titled “2025 Blog Ideas” and any time I hear about a weird marketing trick, see an interesting game, or see someone complain about something on Reddit I write down a sentence or two so that I Continue Reading
BALL x PIT: My game of the year 2025
BALL x PIT is my favorite game of 2025. A lot of other people think so too because it is sitting at over 15,000 reviews. I like it because it has that juicy slot machine animation when you get a ball behind a line of enemies, it has that one-more-turn loop, Continue Reading
Review Guesser How To
Jonas Tyroller released a fun free browser plugin that hides the number of Steam reviews a game has and you have to guess between 6 options. Then it tells you if you got it wrong. Here is a link for you to download it yourself and install it on your Continue Reading
The cycle of a hit genre
In the last blog post I pointed out that indies should be optimistic about the Steam marketplace because there are so many genres just exploding in popularity and most of those games can be made in short periods of time. Here are the genres that I really think fit this: Continue Reading
The optimistic view that indie games are in a golden age right now
It has been a rough couple of years in the games industry with layoffs and studio closures. However, from the perspective of a single-I or small team, we are in the middle of a golden age and most developers don’t realize it. (Side note most journalists don’t realize we are Continue Reading
Steam Next Fest October 2025: Checking in on the games that broke through
I don’t think I am going to do a big survey of all the games that were in Steam Next Fest this year. I didn’t see anything too different. People showing their numbers in the HTMAG discord conform to what we saw last year. But I always like to look Continue Reading
Ghost stories to scare indie developers
It’s officially spooky season – I pulled our family’s Halloween decorations out of the garage this past weekend. Our collective need for Halloween and horror is to expose ourselves to our fears (irrational or not) so that we can transcend them and take on the real horrors of the world. Continue Reading