Game development insights, tutorials, and updates from the Egmatic team.
When your game gets cloned: archive first, know what copyright protects, file a DMCA notice where it fits, out-ship the copycat where it does not.
Valve's docs say what the Steam store algorithm rewards: purchases, playtime, languages, tags. Wishlists, traffic and conversion are mostly not inputs.
Most indie games never need a database. You need one only for shared world state, cross-player queries, or many writers at once; files carry the rest.
Steam Cloud and Play Games never meet: cross-platform saves need one player identity plus neutral storage. Here is how indie games bridge them.
AI assistants draft assets, dialogue, and balance tables well under your review, and fail at whole games from one prompt. Here is the split that works.
Rhythm games need audio-clock precision, roguelikes need iteration speed, platformers need deterministic physics. Pick by genre, not by feature list.
Yes, you can playtest a game with no art. Run a graybox build: plain shapes, counters instead of visuals, tasks that test the loop, not the look.
Turn your playtest into a Steam demo when the build survives strangers: one Next Fest per game, demo review three weeks out, one email to wishlisters.
Run each playtest with a script: a short brief, silent observation while the tester thinks aloud, and questions about what just happened, not opinions.
Price a first indie game between $10 and $20, skip the $5 dead zone, and let Steam's suggested regional prices carry the other 36 currencies.
A median game sells 0.1 to 0.2 times its wishlist count in week one; lifetime conversion runs 5 to 20 percent. Here is the data and how to plan with it.
A third of 2026 Steam releases carry an AI disclosure. Here is what the flood takes from you, what it does not, and what still gets human-made games seen.