Accept up front that the public is hostile to indie developers

A while ago I made Dustpile, a completely free Steam backlog Tinder. I posted it to r/Steam and r/SteamDeck from my own account. The subject is entirely Steam, 0 monetisation and 0 ads, and I broke no rules.

The community liked it too. I had to upgrade the servers to keep up with the traffic, and the r/SteamDeck post became the most upvoted post of the day. Then the mods removed both posts, and r/Steam banned me from a Discord I have never even joined.

On the mod side there is nothing to be surprised about. They are permanently in power trip mode, they delete whatever lands in front of them, and when you ask why they turn it into a show of force. Whether your post is good and lands with the community is never the point. Every one of them is following their own nonsense agenda.

I went through the same thing with DriveWave. A lot of subreddits would not even let me post the game, and the only reason was that I had posted Metal Thunder before. The game is free, so I went to the free Steam games subreddits as well, and got the same result there. If a player had posted the same link it would have stayed up. They found a free tool, I did self promo.

The same goes for the Turkish press and Turkish influencers. They post about AAA all day, but apart from #reklam and #işbirliği, the paid ad tags, there are no posts about Turkish indies beyond a handful of people.

And there is no chance they missed Dustpile. It got 2M+ reach on Twitter alone, and more than 10 big outlets including Dexerto, IGN and Kotaku covered it organically. Two places in Turkey posted it, WebTekno and Checkpoint. Apart from them the only ones who posted were people I am personally in touch with, thanks again.

On top of that I sent the first pitch mail and the follow up mail, and wrote to some of them in Twitter DMs. I also know they post tools like this. Some of the ones I mailed replied within seconds and asked for money. So sometimes being a developer is not even enough, what counts is which developer you are and whether you pay. Because they are the only people in the world who pay taxes.

So take the Turkish press off your mailing list. Nobody is obliged to cover anything, of course, but this is insincerity, plain and simple. 70+ outlets around the world posted Dustpile, the ones here do not fill one hand, and it is already obvious which side to spend your energy on. With games it is never worth it anyway, wishlists coming from Turkey almost always convert badly.

And on top of all that, whatever the platform, there is a crowd that sees you as an insect and does not want you to exist there at all. They are hunting for a place to stick the word “slop” on everything you make, and if you use AI anywhere in a game or a tool it multiplies. Rules are not the issue there any more, the moment they hear the tool the conversation is closed. They do not even look at what you made, and if they could they would wipe you out. They are exactly like a cult. And the loudest ones are developer-ish types who think their own slop is valuable because a human made it, and who have almost never managed to ship a single product in their lives.

They are not consistent either. Expedition 33, the game everyone writes odes to, won 9 awards at The Game Awards and took game of the year, the most awarded game in the show’s history. The same game gave back the two awards it won at the Indie Game Awards because it used gen AI. Same game, same AI, two opposite decisions. So there is no rule here, there is a lynching applied to whoever happens to fall in front of them. And the place the purity test gets applied is the indie category, which is exactly where you stand, not the billion dollar corpos.

The lesson to take from this is not “stay off Reddit” or “do not post your game” or “do not use AI”. It is seeing that you never needed their approval.

Dustpile was deleted from two subreddits and the Turkish press ignored it. It still reached 2M people and more than 70 places around the world posted it. I lived the same thing with Metal Thunder and DriveWave, and both are still going in their own lane.

Do not play a single channel. There will always be people gatekeeping to their own agenda, and there will always be other doors that open. Do not take criticism that has no basis and comes out of an agenda to heart either, your only job is to get as much reach as you can. Once the work is good and starts pulling reach on its own, all of that gets lost among the positive and supportive comments anyway.

You do not need any of them.