Why this exists
A little joke with a point.
INDIEGAMES/WTF is a curator for indie games. We dig through Steam looking for the small, weird, lovingly made games that deserve way more eyes than they get.
Next Fest got… crowded
This October, Steam Next Fest hosted more than 8,000 games. That's a huge jump compared to previous editions. (The explicit ones are filtered out here, so this site holds 7,076 of them.)
The #gamedev and #indiegames communities felt it, and not in a good way. Timelines filled up with frustration: developers worried about being buried before anyone even saw their capsule, players scrolling page after page wondering where the actual games went.
The real risk isn't that there are too many games. It's that saturation gets so extreme that nobody can find the hidden gems anymore, and stumbling on one is one of the best things about indie games.
It's getting better
We're pretty sure Steam is working on it. Thousands of negative comments are hard to miss. And after Wednesday things improved a lot thanks to the Personalized view, which builds the list around your tastes.
In my case it actually worked: what I saw was mostly games made with care, with the kind of love it takes to build something as beautiful as a video game.
So why this page?
Honestly? It's a little joke. But swipe through a few dozen games and you'll notice something: choosing gets really hard when the quantity is this extreme. Mixed in with games that took someone months (or years) of work, there are plenty that were clearly pumped out in a few hours with a handful of prompts and zero love. They don't just take up space: they bury the games that actually deserve a fair look.
So take a second on each card and learn to spot the difference. Show some love to the devs who put their heart into it.