The latest Steam store redesign is here, and while the majority of you have “no strong feelings” about it so far according to our poll, it’s a different story on social media—some indie developers are worried that the new “Popular Upcoming” page, which prioritizes games with more buzz than it did previously, will hurt indie visibility.
One particularly viral post on X from publisher of the indie game Skyshard, RegisKillbin, says that the page used to list games in release order, “as long as you had enough wishlists to make the cut (~6k to 7k),” but now favors “far more large games from major companies … the lowest wishlist count on there right now is 80k.”
You can still select “release date” as the sorting criteria from a drop-down menu, but the page is turning up lots of heavy hitters right now by default—The Adventures of Elliot, Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced, and NBA The Run are all in the top 10 when sorted by relevance, and none of those games remain when you sort by release date.
The section was “updated in response to player feedback in order to better capture the most anticipated releases of the coming month,” Valve said of the change.
The worry is that this change may funnel players toward a smaller slice of games than they’re already being shown. It’s challenging to be noticed on Steam: Of the over 19,000 games that launched on Steam last year, nearly half have fewer than 10 user reviews. More than 10% of the games that launched in 2025 have no reviews at all.
The issue is compounded if you are entering a crowded dev space or making a game in a niche genre: RPG Maker games, visual novels, etc. “Indie visibility was already tough, unfortunately it is now much tougher,” said Ryan T. Brown, head of Lost In Cult’s publishing label, on X.
Not all indie devs are so sour on the redesign, however. Valve also added a new “Personal Calendar” feature “for more niche upcoming releases,” and some say that it has more than offset the Popular Upcoming change.
The calendar is “heavily weighed towards smaller games, in fact way smaller than the ‘popular upcoming’ panel” said the X account for indie dungeon crawler Fight Knight. Another game account, for the metroidvania Maseylia, said in a post that the new release calendar helped them get over a thousand new wishlists yesterday alone.
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