I am stubbornly, doggedly, and maybe even a bit irrationally determined to understand what sells on Steam and why. Author and screenwriter of The Princess Bride, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and Marathon Man, William Goldman might call an effort like this an impossible task. In his book Adventures in the Screen, he famously said “nobody knows anything” when it comes to predicting success in Hollywood:
And why did Universal, the mightiest studio of all, pass on Star Wars, a decision that just may cost them, when all the sequels and spinoffs and toy money and book money and video-game money are totaled, over a billion dollars? Because nobody, nobody—not now, not ever—knows the least goddam thing about what is or isn’t going to work at the box office.
But clearly Goldman himself knew a thing or two about writing hits. His 17 films grossed a total $655 million worldwide and he racked up 11 awards and 15 nominations including 2 Oscars and 3 Golden Globes.
Even if we admit that some people know something about success, some still view the very attempt to understand the market as counterproductive to real, raw creativity. The market is the apple in the Garden of Eden of creativity. Take one bite and you’ll turn into one of those slithering suits who is forever cursed to design by committee. And for indies who pride themselves on authentic artistic expression, there’s nothing worse than coming across as a calculating suit. In an interview on IGN, game director of Metaphor: ReFantazio and the Persona games, Katsura Hashino said:
“I feel like if you have these super highly polished games that look like they were designed by a bunch of people in a CEO boardroom, that doesn’t really excite me — it doesn’t really interest me”, he admits, bluntly. “But when I see these sorts of games [which reveal a little about the people that made them], it really fills me with the motivation to keep developing,” he says. “That these artists, these creatives, had something they really wanted to say is where I get all of my inspiration from, and the drive to continue to be creative myself.”
I learned as much when my postmortem, Why Our Game Flopped, circulated among a group of indie developers on X earlier this year. Many posters were eager to point out that it was my very attempt at market analysis that was the cause of my commercial failure. One reply said: “This is how you know you're going to fail. Just make a good game and stop worrying about it.” Their advice was: just dream big.
I think they’re dead wrong here. Not “worrying about it” is avoidant and risky. I’d rather take Ambrook founder Mackenzie Burnett’s advice and reframe worry as de-risking. We should use market analysis to our advantage, to ground our wildest dreams.
I’m removing the paywall on my wishlist rundown this week. Every Monday, I highlight three upcoming indie games that have reached a significant number of wishlists on Steam leading up to launch. Paid subscribers get my take on why these games are hyped and why they’re suggestive of larger trends on Steam.
Onto the rundown…
No, I'm not a Human
Estimated wishlists: 715K
Release date: September 15, 2025
Steam page created: 12 months ago
Demo info: Released June 8, 2025 / 956 reviews / 98% positiveWARNING. Stay inside. Lock your doors. Close the blinds. Only let humans in. Eliminate all Visitors. An anxiety horror about paranoia in the End of Times.
No, I’m not a Human feels like a perfect encapsulation of what players are looking for from shorter indie horror games on Steam. An early version of the game was released in August 2024 as a part of the the horror game anthology Violent Horror Stories. YouTuber Jacksepticeye got a hold of it a few months later and called it “one of the best new horror games.” The game clearly had strong appeal even in its early state.
It was signed by prolific bizzarro horror-ish games publisher CRITICAL REFLEX (publisher of Buckshot Roulette) sometime around December 2024. At the time it had amassed around 200K wishlists. The Steam page for the full game had been live for only a couple months. Crazy numbers! The developers, Trioskaz, released an updated demo in June coinciding with Steam Next Fest and it continued to gain visibility from there.
The core gameplay loop of No, I’m Not a Human is reminiscent of inspection games like Papers Please or Quarantine Zone: The Last Check and spot-the-difference or anomaly games like The Cabin Factory. You chat with visitors seeking shelter through the peephole at your front door and choose whether or not to let them in. The characters are creepy looking and the dialogue is just vague enough to keep you wondering what’s really going on outside. Screenshots of the game really pop with strong art direction causing the game to stand out immediately at a glance.
I’m sure we’ll start to see more horror games that deploy a branching, almost roguelike-flavored, run-based, narrative structure like this. It seems to be a great way to keep the all important average playtime and concurrent user metrics up in a genre that’s typically known (at least in the case of indies) for shorter games that you can finish in one sitting.
See also: Who’s at the door?, another recent door-based inspection/anomaly horror game that sold well, and the intentionally dumbed down pitch form from CRITICAL REFLEX that’s worth checking out if you’ve got a particularly weird game and need a publisher, and TROLEU (est. 47K wishlists) another game published by CRITICAL REFLEX coming out this week.
If you’re unfamiliar with how Steam follower counts are used to estimate wishlists, or just unfamiliar with the wishlist metric altogether, see these helpful breakdowns from How To Market A Game here and from GameDiscoverCo here and here.
Henry Halfhead
Estimated wishlists: 40K wishlists
Release date: September 16, 2025
Steam page created: 31 months ago
Demo info: Released but removed from Steam before launchMeet Henry, merely half a head, yet with the peculiar ability to become any object within their reach! Discover every object’s unique abilities and cleverly combine them to take Henry through their not-so-ordinary everyday life.
Henry Halfhead is a playful sandbox game with a colorful art style reminiscent of Untitled Goose Game where you can become any object within reach and generally just wreck havoc. Players on Steam love sandbox games. Chris Zukowski of How To Market A Game has highlighted this previously saying:
These games are like marble mazes or domino tracks. The are digital Rube Goldberg machines. The point of the game is to setup a strange scenario then push play and see what happens. They typically rely on hilarious physics, jank, buggy behaviors, glitches, and explosions.
The first few seconds of the trailer for Henry Halfhead shows a sequence where the player (get ready)…becomes a chair and slides under a table, then transforms into an apple on the floor, hops onto the chair and onto the table, then rolls towards a plate, morphs into a knife and cuts the apple up into pieces only to switch back to the default “halfhead” character and devour the freshly sliced apple pieces.
And of course, a clip of this very sequence blew up on TikTok in March 2023 racking up 136K views and 1462 likes. The emergent, playful humor in these sorts of sandbox games is a key part of their appeal. Good sandbox games are, what you could call, clippable. With sandbox games, random moments of gameplay can be readily captured by players and streamers alike to post on social media.
Henry Halfhead was developed by a team of 6 over the course of 5 years. This long development timeline screams risky to me for a small indie, but it seems like the team did a good job validating the game as they went. The game started as a student project in 2020 and was later announced in the MIX Showcase in 2023 and subsequently featured in Wholesome Direct and Day of the Devs. It’s also important to point out that the game was at least in part funded by the Swiss Arts Council. The team has received at least $128,000 in grant funding over the past five years. It looks like the game has impressive systemic depth and it’s certainly not the kind of project that could be realized on a shoestring budget. Grants can be a good option for certain types of games. Let me know if you want to see a post where I deep dive into grants for games.
I’m a little surprised the game doesn’t have more wishlists than it does. We’ll keep an eye on how well it sells. 40K is well beyond the often-cited 10K wishlists you need to have a chance at wider visibility on Steam but, when you spread it out over the course of the 31 months that the Steam page has been live that’s just 1.2K wishlists per month. This pales in comparison to the other two games in this rundown which had significantly shorter development times and are launching with much higher wishlist counts with Easy Deliver Co. averaging 18.3K per month and No, I’m not a Human averaging 58K per month.
See also: Everything, the game where you can become a frog, a tiny particle, a galaxy and everything in between, and mouthful mode in Kirby and the Forgotten Land.
Easy Delivery Co.
Estimated wishlists: 203K
Release date: September 18, 2025
Steam page created: 11 months ago
Demo: Released April 24, 2025 / 1,104 reviews / 97% positiveEasy Delivery Co. is a relaxing driving game with strange secrets. Chill out, make deliveries and get to know the mysterious residents of this scenic mountain town, all while earning well below minimum wage. Play at your own pace or play in split-screen race mode with up to four players.
Looking at screenshots of Easy Delivery Co. gives you the sense that this game was destined to reach wide visibility on Steam just purely due to “the vibes”. The game features exploration and job sim-style gameplay with cute animal crossing-inspired characters set in an open world cozy mountain town all wrapped in a retro PS1 look. At the time of the demo release, an article on Vice said:
Something about Easy Delivery Co. is slightly unsettling, but I mean that in the most positive of ways. There’s something a bit off about this town. But I can’t help but soak in the vibes as I cruise down the street. The bed of my truck is loaded up with deliveries and ready to be dropped off at the earliest possible time. It’s creepy and kooky, mysterious and spooky, but most importantly, it’s also incredibly adorable.
The Steam page for the game was published in November 2024. It received its first bump in wishlists on January 19, 2025 when this clip (see embed below) was posted by the developer, Sam C, on X. It reached 173K views and 5.9K likes and brought in about 500 wishlists (rough approximation from looking at the follower graph). The game really began to take off with the launch of the demo in April 2025 which coincided with a reveal trailer posted by GameTrailers. Subsequent clips posted by the developer on X have regularly surpassed tens of thousands of views.
Easy Delivery Co. was made by solo developer Sam C. It seems to have been in development for at least a year with Reddit posts from the developer dating back to September 2024. A couple of these posts on Reddit performed relatively well reaching over 1K upvotes, but from the looks of the followers graph below they didn’t have much of an effect on wishlists. Good early validation nonetheless. The game was picked up by Oro Interactive around the time of the demo release. They’re a new publisher that puts out “catchy, creator-focused games” and has a novel operating model with their website explaining:
YOU DEVELOP. WE PUBLISH.
We act as an external "in-house" publishing branch. We know, weird right.
This basically means that you can focus on creating games and we take care of (and pay for) everything else: marketing, PR, localization, playtesting, and QA. Porting TBD on context.
On occasions, we provide project funding up to a maximum of $50,000.
As the number of games on Steam continues to grow, some creators are finding it more difficult to sift through the overwhelming number of releases. Perhaps this creator-focused publishing model will become more common. Publishers can serve as both a middle man for developers and a curator for creators.
See also: See other games published by Oro Interactive including Murky Divers and Order 13 along with upcoming games Dead Format and Roadside Research, which I mentioned in my post Six months or bust here:
Thanks for reading and have a great week.