Indie game postmortem writeups are the most underutilized free education in game development. Hundreds of shipped indie titles publish detailed postmortems on Game Developer, Reddit, itch.io, and personal dev blogs every year, yet most studios making the exact same mistakes never read them. After collecting and categorizing patterns from postmortems published over the past several …
Game demo strategy is now arguably the most important marketing decision indie devs make, because Steam’s algorithm explicitly favors games with active demos and Steam Next Fest has become the single highest wishlist-velocity event of the indie calendar. A well-executed demo can produce more wishlists in a week than six months of organic marketing. A …
Indie game press kit quality is one of the cheapest, highest-leverage assets in your launch arsenal — yet most indies ship a Dropbox folder with three screenshots and a Word doc and wonder why nobody covered them. A well-built press kit removes friction for journalists and content creators, which is the only thing that actually …
Indie game monetization is the decision that shapes every other design choice in your project, yet most first-time studios pick a model based on what their last favorite game did instead of what fits their actual title. There are only about six viable monetization models for indies in 2026, and matching the right one to …
Steam wishlist tactics are the single most important growth lever for an indie launch, because Valve’s algorithm uses wishlist velocity—not raw follower counts—as its primary signal for featuring your title. After shipping games and watching dozens of teams do the same, one pattern repeats: studios that treat wishlists as a daily tracked metric consistently outperform …