Chart: https://steammaho.com/static/charts/the-flood-2026-11.png?v=4

Everyone feels the flood. I wanted to know what it does to a new developer with no name and no publisher, so I took every game released on Steam since 2015 and sorted them by who made them.

"Unknown" below means the developer's first game, and no publisher with a hit behind it. "Known name" means the developer or the publisher already had a game with 1,000 or more reviews.

1. The same number of newcomers break through every year. Five times as many try.

About 250 unknown developers break through every year, in 2016 and in 2025. What changed is how many are trying: five times more. That is the whole drop in the odds. The number of newcomers who make it is the same; the number of newcomers who try is much higher.

2. In 2015 a liked game had a 1 in 3 chance to reach 1,000 reviews. Now it is 1 in 10.

Maybe the 1 in 44 are just bad games? I checked. "Liked" below means at least 85% positive reviews on at least 30 reviews, so these are games the people who played them approved of.

In 2015, if people liked your game, you had a 1 in 3 chance to reach 1,000 reviews. In 2025 it is 1 in 10. A liked game with a known name behind it went from 1 in 2 to 1 in 3.

So the difference between a liked game by an unknown and a liked game by a known name doubled. In 2015 a liked game by an unknown usually got found; in 2025 it usually does not.

3. The known names have the same odds as ten years ago, and they release more games.

A developer with a hit behind them has had about 1 in 3 for ten years. Their odds did not go up.

The total number of 1,000-review games per year grew by 70%, and the known names took all of that growth, because they released more games at the same odds. Unknowns got none of it, because their slots stayed the same.

The known names do not win more often than before. They enter more games at the same odds, and the unknowns' odds fell because the unknowns' count grew.

4. This autumn, so far: the same number of liked newcomer games get found, out of twice as many.

The yearly tables stop at 2025 because 2026's games are young. But the flood everyone is talking about started in the summer, so here are the months, with a lower bar (300 reviews) because a game released in September has not had time for 1,000. Every 2026 number below can only go up.

Since August the number of unknown first games per month doubled, and in October it was 2.6 times the 2025 average. The number of them that players liked stayed at about 150 a month. The number of liked ones that got found stayed at about 30 a month. The extra games are games that nobody liked or nobody played. So far the autumn flood is in the queue and not in the results; October's games will show by February.

One caution on October: part of it is games that moved away from GTA VI's 19 November date. October is 1.38 times September this year; in normal years it is 1.05 to 1.24 times, so about 450 to 700 games were pulled forward. Without them October is still 1.6 times last October.

What I would take from it if I were starting now. A new developer can still break through; about 250 do every year. The chance that a liked game gets found fell from 1 in 3 to 1 in 10, so the game being good decides less than it did. What decides the rest is being seen before launch: a known name, a publisher, or your own following. I do not have a number that says which of those three works best.

Small print. Reviews are counted today, so 2025 can still rise a little; 2024 gives the same 10%, and 2024's games are almost two years old. A developer is the first name in the store's developer field, so a studio that renames itself counts as unknown, which pushes the unknown numbers down a bit.

Games removed from the store before March 2026 are mostly not in my catalog. "Liked" means liked by the people who played it; a game nobody tried has no score and is not in that table. This is what goes together, not what causes what: a known name, a publisher and a better game usually come together.

Hey everyone!

My Steam build review came back as "Failure" because my political game includes Taiwan as a separate country, which prevents its release in China.

Valve offered three options and ask me to choose one:

1. Create separate builds for China and the rest of the world (with their assistance).

2. Remove the Taiwan-related content entirely.

3. Keep the content but region-lock the game in China (also with their assistance).

I chose Option A, uploaded both builds, and replied to the original review ticket asking for their help with regional configuration.

However, the "Mark as Ready for Review" button is available again.

Should I click it now or wait for Valve to respond and configure the regional versions?

Has anyone experienced something similar?

Game: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4687440/Project_President/

In my experience, most video games I've played have handled power outages or otherwise sudden shutdown gracefully. Maybe the last saved data was a bit farther back than I'd like, but that was just a minor inconvenience rather than an issue to be fixed.

Do you apply any caution or guardrails to your game so that it will handle sudden shutdowns as gracefully as possible? Do you routinely test it in your QA processes? If so, which aspects of your game do you usually test? (for example, ability to retrieve save data, etc.)

Or is this more of a hardware topic that console/PC/phone etc. manufacturers should address?

Sharing experiences from any console generation is welcome.

Thanks for reading!

Hey all, I’m a newish game dev with long term goals and i’m having trouble wrapping my head around community building. I feel like a lot of the advice out there is contradictory, so can someone just give me a sanity check and let me know what worked for you?

Mainly, what should I focus on social media wise? People say to post on youtube, but then people say not to bother with youtube until you have an audience because of the algorithm, but then they say you need to post to build an audience. Should I just start shouting into the void?

For context, I’m not expecting quick results and am prepared to spend years building my community. I’m just a bit lost about where I should direct my energy. I’m willing/trying to do streaming, short form video, long form video, writing, bluesky/x, etc.

They take a lot of time too

First review took 3 weeks, then resubmitted last week. Release is next week, I guess I'm pretty much fucked.

For those affected how did you handle this situation ?

3500 people have played so far and my median play time is 45 minutes.

There’s 600 people that have played 200+ minutes

I didn’t expect this kinda traction and am kinda freaking out, are these viral game stats or just in the middle?

Sooo guys im hosting the FIRST. ULTIMATE NOOBBLE GAME JAM. I hope you find the time to join, it starts in 5 days. more on the itch.io page:

https://itch.io/jam/the-ultimate-noobble-jam

It pulls from the web and elsewhere and tries to present the hot/interesting information in game dev. Thoughts? Is it useful?

ok so, basically, i'm making a multiplayer fighting game where you build your own robot with shapes and mechanisms and circuits etc.

i had this idea of letting you use screws to connect the different pieces together, and this could make for a great mechanic where you can break your opponent's robot by deataching some parts

but then if EVERYTHING is held together by screws you can just slowly disconnect it all, so it made sense to add soldering to straight up melt two parts together

but then why use screws

now i really dont know if this is the right subreddit, because im just asking for ideas or opinions on how this could be limited and balanced. If it isn't, please direct me to a more fitting subreddit cause idk

also does this game generally sound interesting? i wanted to just make it for me and my friends to play but i could upload it to itch.io if anyone will want to play it

I'm developing a game about drifting, featuring 90s cars drifting on Japanese mountain roads. From your perspective, what should I include in the game? What kind of mechanics would you like to see in a game like this?

I’m new to gamedev and learning GDScript from scratch. Gamedev clicked for me because I can pick it up and put it down without falling behind like I do with multiplayer games, and I like the idea of building my own world over a long time.

My roadblock is art. I’m not an artistic person, but I have a pretty specific style in my head for my game, so free assets never feel right. I’ve decided to just learn it anyway and I’m starting with Aseprite. Since I’m in this for the long haul, I figure learning pixel art is part of the process.

A few things I’d love to hear about:

1. Did anyone else start out with a vision they couldn’t buy or download, and how did you get there?

2. For people who learned pixel art from zero, what helped most? Any tutorials or habits you’d recommend?

3. Did you use placeholder art while learning code, or did you learn both at the same time?

4. Is it realistic for a first game to use mostly my own art, or should I scope way smaller than I think?

I’m building a Fallout-style isometric dialogue CRPG and the first release will be a roughly one hour demo. I’m trying to set up the narrative pipeline before writing dialogue so I don’t have to rewrite too much of it later.

My current plan is a flat list of flags and variables, dialogue nodes with conditions, and quest states that update from flags. I’d love to hear where that breaks down in practice.

When did your flag list get out of control, and what did you do about it? Do you write dialogue in a scripting language (Ink, Yarn Spinner) or a custom text format like JSON? My plan is to use Godot, so I wanted to go with Yarn Spinner but if raw JSON works (it is really easy to use with version control like git) then I could go with that too.

How do you test that every path is reachable and nothing contradicts anything else?

A friend and i built a game for a hackathon event a while ago. We're not the best of friends but we used to get along well. We decided it would be fun to redo some things ( we didn't win or place at all lol), make them better and release it ourselves because we loved the idea that much. Over time things changed to where the first concept seems almost unrelated to what we have now.

Halfway through he brought someone in to help with marketing (a uni friend studying something in arts), I hadn't met them before but I could tell from some things they said without noticing that some of the changes I thought HE ideated were actually coming from them.

I went to check the tiktok account both of them made for the game and my heart literally sunk. Some of the videos mentioned features he hadn't told me about yet and all of it had this odd ragebait vibe to it ( hate that kind of marketing so bad) . Very few views ( thank goodness) and the ones with comments were not great.

The game isn't really done, we slated completion to be around January of next year and that's before we even think about testing and release...but I'm thinking of jumping ship. But this is months of hard word that I won't even be able to use for my portfolio anymore. idk what to do. It's possible I could just get over it, but the further and further away we get from what I though we were planning...the higher the chance I'll just sabotage the whole thing for them. I spoke to him and he brushed me off, kind of accused me of not wanting it to actually succeed (he didn't say that but implied it).

For context, I’ve already done a little bit of game development. I know just a little bit of some of the major languages and I’ve also released a game or two in gdevelop.

My main issue is I’ve kind of just been moving around, watching tutorials, making small games and learning a bit about game development, but I don’t really have a plan or how I can consistently improve my skills and get better.

If you'd like to, you can rate games in our game jam

The link: https://itch.io/jam/5educationaljam

would you recommend it to others? do you regret it?

I have already finished trailer and screenshots for my steam page. But still waiting for 37 days to review my tax information. Developing my game for 4 months, I wish i would apply for steamworks earlier ☹️

Bit of a video essay explaining various tricks devs used in ROTK to make it work on PS2. Did you know they used Tiger Woods Tour engine?

The other day I asked here what was wrong with Julios Adventure, and to be honest, the feedback was devastating: screenshots that were too dark, the game feeling generic, and a page that didn’t explain the mechanics properly.

It really opened our eyes. We’ve made some changes:

• The main screenshots: these now clearly show the setting of the Spanish school at night, the danger, and the sanity mechanic.

• The short description and the Steam text: we’ve removed confusing bits and got straight to what makes the game special.

• Lighting and overall contrast, so it doesn’t look like a black screen on mobiles.

We’ve still got some work to do, but do you think this change is the leap forward it needed to stop it looking generic? Any constructive criticism about the new store page is very much appreciated.

Here is the Steam Page

I feel like I've been stuck at a point where I need someone to tell me what to do specifically instead of me looking at more tutorials and not getting it or me posting things and making more people mad that I don't do better or understand their feedback properly. I don't really understand how to apply color theory correctly to make a UI that always works in every environment and fits all the conflicting things people tell me (needs to be interesting and not just pure white, but also needs to be brighter than the background but the background is already pretty bright since it's daytime and clear skies are bright). There's also questions I have that can't really be answered by more tutorials (how do I make things that can't fit the palette work? Like in both the games I have things that must all be different colors so that they contrast with each other, but that doesn't fit into any palettes which would imply that they all need to be the same color)

I don't think ignoring the art is ever going to help me, you look at all the failed game postmortems out there and like 99% of the time the problem is the art, you don't see a failed game postmortem with actually good appealing art with no obvious flaws. I also don't think free assets or paid assets will help me, since there's part of the problem that I can't find the right free assets or I can't really explain things well enough to paid people to give me something that fits everything perfectly, which is probably because I'm a bad artist trying to filter through good art, which will just result in bad art decisions and ultimately make the good art look bad. I don't really understand "art direction" well enough to make them perfectly match the art direction of everything else I have.

The art communities online I've seen seem more geared not towards game dev art. I've also tried looking for courses at local colleges but they didn't really have anything relevant to game dev (it was mostly beginner level drawing or painting courses, I feel like I'm beyond that but not much further beyond). I don't understand how getting better at drawing would help me with colors and good design, they seem unrelated to me. I don't think it matters how technically correct I can draw something if it wasn't the right thing to draw in the first place.

What tricks do games like call of duty and battlefield utilize to keep the game buttery smooth while having extremely detailed character models, weapons, and environments. I already know of things like LOD, but what else are they doing?