I asked a few scammers how they find and target game developers to request free game keys.

I came up with a couple very simple tricks to 100% catch all of them and auto-flag them as scam.

(thread) Their main vector of attack is this page: help.steampowered.com/en/wizard/Help…

It's the Steam support page for each game, which lists websites and contact e-mails.

You simply have to replace the appid for each game. For example, 1260520 will lead you to @clockworkpat 's e-mail.

I made some research.
Steam broke its record last year: 9 279 releases in 2020.

That's twice from 2016.

That's a release every 53 minutes.

50% of games sold less than 640 units.

75% of games sold less than 2800 units.

5% of games made 90% of all the sales. More in-depth data if we filter only indie games:

6376 indie games in 2020.

50% of indies sold less than 640 units.

75% of indies sold less than 2480 units.

5% of games made 88% of all sales.

A few years ago, I started working on a Game Boy emulator for fun and paused it...

...I went back to it to implement the last big chunk: sound.

I shed a tear of joy hearing the half-assed Kirby's music through my bugged child (only 2/4 channels done).😭

github.com/mrhelmut/LeBoy Let's continue to work on this emulator and add the 3rd sound channel which is a limited wave channel.

I only got the two quadrangular channels so far, and I'm also missing the noise channel.

Do you need a publisher? Or, its corollary, can you self-publish a game on your own?

The answer to this basically comes down to understanding what a publisher actually is, and what are your knowledge and capabilities to handle that.

Let's explore this through a thread! Let's first debunk a still persisting misconception: a good game, no matter how good it is or how much effort you put in it, will not talk by itself.

It maybe was true 10 years ago (and even then), or for 0.001% of games, but let's be honest, there's only one Notch per decade.

Want to pitch a game project to a publisher?

Here comes a thread with some tips based on our experience! 1) Know the publisher.

Publishers have an editorial. They specialize themselves in specific types of games.

If your project doesn't fit their editorial, it is very likely that it's not worth trying.

Also, if a publisher doesn't seem to have an editorial: it's fishy.