"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

Former World of Warcraft veteran designer Chris Kaleiki is prepping his new extraction RPG for early access, but he's not too worried about its launch because he reckons Steam's algorithm is "impenetrable," and as long as the game is good it'll get in front of the right people.

Chris Kaleiki is perhaps best known for designing WoW classes for 13 years, but he's trying to change that at his new company Notorious Studios with a new game, the PvPvE RPG Legacy: Steel & Sorcery, which is headed to early access on February 12.

Of course, launching any game these days can be a gamble because, well, there are way too many games to keep track of and gamers only have so much bandwidth to play with them all. Even so, Kaleiki told GamesRadar he feels "super excited" about launch and "in some ways, I was more nervous or had more anxiety when we did the first alpha friends and family play test, because again, I didn't quite know how the game would go." Now that he knows "the game is good based on player feedback," some of that trepidation is gone. "There are some players who play the game literally, gosh, 60 hours during a week play test. So I think there's a market for it. There's a player who is interested in it. I think it's fun."

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His personal feelings aside, there's also the commercial side of releasing a game - "the marketing, getting it out there, getting players to see it" is a whole different story. "And this is the bane to every game developer's existence these days because marketing is completely shifting on how to market a game."

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. "

We'll see how Legacy: Steel & Sorcery does when it hits Steam early access in just a few days.

In the meantime, keep an eye on the upcoming indie games of 2025 and beyond.