Second workshop day of our PPP workshop series. Having @riad.de talking right now about early validation!
Short glimpse here 👀
Thanks to all participants, Erich Pommer Institute and medienboard for making this possible!
🧶 Play / Promote / Publish - three of the key challenges of indie developers these days. Usually the "Play" or game design aspects works out well but when we talk about promotion and publishing it looks like quite different and can be even more challenging. That is why we ... 🧶 1/x
#indiegamedev
Announcing my pagan trading game Prophet Margin
Wishlist now on Steam! store.steampowered.com/app/3624110/...
Sharing appreciated!
Good write-up by @riad.de about #Steam Algorithm
"A common consensus used to be: "Ideas are nothing, execution is everything." I think we have to reverse that. We are back to the point where ideas are everything."
⚔️ www.linkedin.com/pulse/steam-...
Yesterday, our very own Irina ( @codecks.bsky.social ) interviewed @joostvandongen.bsky.social about how Galaxy Grove organizes their development to ship on time and on budget. Check it out if you want to see real examples from successful studios making great games.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Huu...
I'll speaking as well here. Happy to support this initiative!
Huge thanks to everyone who played, shared & gave feedback on The Greenening demo! 💚
The response has been kind, constructive & way bigger than I expected.
Lots to think about now, but it's a great place to be in 😊
Haven’t tried it yet? 🌱 store.steampowered.com/app/3634980/...
#indiedev
There is a lot of space in our coop office for indie game developers in Berlin at the moment!
Wenn Geoff Keighley "Guten Tag" sagt, sende ich das natürlich bei Deutschlandfunk Nova. Und auch und spannender den Felix Falk vom @gameverband.bsky.social und @riad.de zum Stand der deutschen Gamesbranche.
Codecks booth at devcom
Showing @codecks.bsky.social at #devcom! If you're here make sure to stop by our booth.
The Saftladen logo. It's an organge holding a gamepad.
As we all know the game industry is going through very turbulent times, unfortunately this has also affected several members of our collective. The silver lining is that one of the largest rooms in our coworking space in Berlin will be available from September 1st.
More info in thread...
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Maschinen-Mensch is yet another award-winning German studio to close its doors. Although the Berlin-based company hopes to make a comeback, it is initially focusing on supporting its team members in their search for new opportunities.
www.gamesmarket.global/business/ger...
So I've tried out Codecks when it was pretty new and while I thought it was neat, it lacked a lot of features.
I came back to it now, migrated a bunch of documentation over from Milanote and I'm incredibly happy with all the new features they added over the years, so I'm finally switching over :D
We just released the biggest Codecks feature so far. A unique way to bridge visual ideation and actual task data in one.
mmensch.codecks.io/changelog
If you're not a hit in Steam's algorithm, you're quickly tossed to the side. From removing the once guaranteed 1M views on launch to funneling more and more views to bigger games. It's just becoming harder having a small modest hit. Super hits are prioritized. AA/AAA is struggling too.
It's interesting times we're living in and one of the reasons why I'm excited to work in games: the landscape is constantly shifting and as creators we always have to adapt to stay relevant. /7
And there is no baseline success for bigger games anymore. Now super hits like Balatro and Stardew Valley are surpassing the commercial reach of games created by 1000+ people teams. /6
Older studios like Maschinen-Mensch benefit from this, but it is getting increasingly harder for new mid-sized studios to find their footing, hence the rise of solo devs who can afford taking the risk of releasing highly innovative games. /5
It is not uncommon that a lot of studios now make more money from their back catalog than their new game releases and are even doubling down on this strategy. Devolver made 88% of its revenue in 2024 from back catalog sales. These games are not going away. 4/
According to reports, the amount of playtime going to fresh games (released within the last 12M) is less than 10%. That means that 90% of playtime goes to older games. And those 10% include heavy hitters by major AAA publishers, so that leaves indie games with a fraction of available play time. 3/
When we released in 2016 there were around 5,000 games on Steam. It's now 100,000+. Sure a lot of them are are not serious contenders, but still the amount of competition by back catalog has grown immensly... 2/
Steam market reality check: When we released CE1 in Sept 2016, 462 games launched that month. This March it was 1,817 games. That's 4x more releases while Steam users only doubled. Doesn't sound that bad right? It's about catalog size though.... 1/
As game dev I often wonder if my intuition about the Steam market matches reality. So I did a small game to test it: Guess how many reviews a random game has. You can now play it too on steamle.com
Some recent days on steamle.com featured the same game across multiple days. That should be fixed now. From now on always fresh games.. until I run out of games on Steam, which should take a while!
Steamle.com - Guess the number of Steam reviews
My results for Day 7
🟧🟩🟨🟩🟨 320/500
Didn't recognize a single game today
I have control over which games to choose from, so I already have some simple rules to avoid all games ending up in the same category to keep the game interesting. Generally there is a bias towards smaller games. Will probably tweak it further :)
Ah yeah I tried a version like that but it was tricky because of logarithmic scale and also added a lot of decision paralysis. I also tried just a number field, but this version was the most fun out of the ones I tested. Maybe later.
I released a smol Steam review guessing game! You asked for the ability to play previous days, so I added it! Enjoy beeating those scores and discovering some new Steam gems. steamle.com