A recent under-the-hood change to Steam has led to major boosts for many game developers, says Tim Bender, CEO of strategy, sim, and RPG specialist publisher Hooded Horse.
In a lengthy LinkedIn post, Bender backs reports from indie game sleuth Simon Carless showing that visibility on Steam – that is, a game's ability to be found by players and shown in recommendation feeds – has improved considerably for indies in the past few weeks and months.
This seems to be tied to one of Steam's biggest feeds: Discounts & Events. Parked right on the homepage, this feed has evidently been updated to be more player-tailored, spending less space on best-selling hits and devoting more slots to curated recommendations based on your playtime, wishlists, and purchases.
"Suddenly I'm seeing indie gems with less than a hundred to a few thousand reviews included as well, of precisely the sort I love," says Bender. "In other page loads I'm getting pushed things like the Gold Box Dungeons and Dragons games from the late 80s/early 90s, with less than 300 reviews since their Steam rerelease 4 years ago – perfect for me."
Bender shares some data to demonstrate this point. In the past six months, one of Hooded Horse's games saw 7,355 Steam page visits via the Discounts & Events feed. A whopping 7,341 of those came in the last month.
This comparison is getting into funny numbers: assuming a previous average of 2.8 visits a month, this feed drove 2,621 times visibility per month after this change from Valve.
"This change took a source of traffic that was non-existent for niche indies, and suddenly made it the best source of traffic in the entire store," Bender observes. He says other developers have told him they've also seen "essentially zero visits" turn into "a few thousand." Another Hooded Horse game saw smaller but still substantial growth: from 6,000 in five months to 14,000 in one month.
"This is great for everyone – players are getting more relevant recommendations, and publishers/developers are having their games shown to the right players – but it's most transformative for smaller indies that previously weren't seeing placement in this section," he continues.
Bender praises the somewhat recent addition of the personal calendar (which has quickly become my favorite feature in the store) and reckons "Steam is on an absolute historic run of improving discoverability lately, especially for indies."
"Occasionally I see people getting attention by saying things like 'discovery is broken on Steam,'" he adds. "In reality, discovery is hard given the number of games, but Steam is the best-in-class store experience and only getting better as time goes on."
Earlier this year, Valve offered a rare look behind the curtain of Steam, revealing that nearly 6,000 games made over $100,000 in 2025.
However, there are still plenty of flops, and the ever-growing number of new games releasing on Steam, now inflated by gen AI assistance, shows no signs of slowing down (even if many devs say they don't want to use gen AI). Just in 2025, it was estimated over 5,000 games released on Steam didn't even make enough money to pay back the $100 fee to put a game on the storefront.
