this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2025
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"Valve does a very good job of surfacing games that players like": As his new RPG prepares for Steam early access, ex-WoW vet says making good games is the only real hack (www.gamesradar.com)
submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/games
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[–] [email protected] 47 points 23 hours ago (3 children)

Despite all the external challenges, Kaleiki still feels "there's not much we can do there with the budget" and "the most important thing is the game has to be good." That's because, according to him, "Valve does a very good job of surfacing games that players like or that players are enjoying" and "the algorithm is almost impenetrable."

"If you watch some indie dev videos, they'll often say we tried hacking the algorithm, we tried doing all these goofy things, and there's not much you can do," he said. "All you can really do is make a good game, which, in a lot of ways, is good news for us, but also this is really hard because there's no little hacks you can do to surface your game like you could 20 years ago. "

I mean, he's got a super valid take here, but also, like.... There's tons of pretty damn good games on Steam, a lot of them very kind of unknown and underrated for how fun they actually are.

Further, you're not just competing with current "good games" you're also competing with classic "good games.*

According to certain sources, there's over 100,000 games in the US Valve game store in 2025.

Over one hundred thousand games.

That's still a rough number of games to be up against, even if only a quarter of them are "good games."

[–] [email protected] 25 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago)

I agree, this article title is literally introducing and teasing the game that he created based on his label of working on a different, more successful game that he was a small part of:

'ex wow dev'

Makes me think another hack might be riding big names on a resume to get games bloggers to write about you

[–] [email protected] 11 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

I have been playing Victoria 3 for almost 300 hours in the past year. Now, i try this and that to help the experience stay fresh and not get bored of it too fast, but that is 300 hours of playtime that no other good game on steam can get. Meaning, it does not matter how good of a game your release today, this weekend, it's going to be Great Qing time and I'm gonna be puzzling over if i should build more administration or not.

As sad as it is, player time is as limited as player budget, and there is a wall sadly where the market just can't absorb more good games.

[–] themoonisacheese 6 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

I mean fair enough but in the context of indies trying to "hack the algorithm", you're probably not even a target because you don't even look at the Steam store.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 18 hours ago

I browse through it now and again, and i follow "gaming news" occasionally. I'm one of those who have a larger back catalog of "well, i wanna play these one day" games than i will probably get through in my life. :/ But yeah, not strictly related to the point of hacking the algorithm, but i still felt like sharing my experience in the context

[–] [email protected] 4 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago) (2 children)

Would you share some of these unknown/underrated games? I'd be curious to see what you mean, because I personally agree with the article and I feel that the games that aren't more popular are generally there for a reason (not that they're bad games, just you know.. some lack of polish, an unpopular genre, too competitive of a genre, etc)

I can't remember the last time I played a game and I was like "how have I not heard of this game before?!"

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 hours ago

The one that came off the top of my head is Kynseed. It's kinda like a more gamified Stardew valley that loses a bit of that personalized Stardew Valley charm due to the breadth of different systems and minigames. The only obviously bad things to say about the game are that there are both too many different systems in the game (which makes some of them feel kinda shallow) and the game takes too much time getting you through the fundamental systems. But beyond that there's a lot of lore, the different systems work well together, the minigames are all polished, there's loads of content - I can't find a good reason why it's not a popular game, it just isn't.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 12 hours ago

I picked up The Thaumaturge based off of an Angry Centaur Gaming review, and for as much as I enjoyed that game, I basically never hear anyone else talk about it. They likely built the game on a modest and reasonable budget, but I'm still concerned that they didn't break even.

Diesel Legacy: The Brazen Age was one of the best games I played last year, but it's just about guaranteed that they did not make their money back, once again on a lean budget.

Cloak and Dasher is a game akin to N++ that my brother and I played at PAX East some years ago, and we were immediately impressed and bought early access copies. It probably hasn't even cracked 1000 copies sold and will likely never leave early access. (They should patch it up and finish it regardless, but what's there now is already great.)

Keep in mind that none of these games are $100M flops. They're great games with reasonable scope that are still struggling to survive. Mimimi closed down because they were just barely breaking even and struggled to find funding even with critical acclaim and a core audience that liked their games.