About Indie Games Database

Who runs this site

Indie Games Database is operated by Yusuke Morinaga, an independent developer based in Japan (GitHub: @mori7ga2222, [email protected]). It is a one-person site: the operator maintains the game list, runs the build pipeline described below, and handles corrections. The registered business mailing address is published on the Contact page.

Where the data comes from

All store facts on this site come from Valve's public Steam Store endpoints:

• Steam Store appdetails API — name, developer, publisher, genre tags, feature categories, release date, short description, header image and list price.
• Steam appreviews summary — total, positive and negative review counts and Steam's review-score label.

A scheduled job (nominally once a day, around 10:00–11:00 JST) re-fetches the price, store description and review counts for every listed game and rebuilds the site; the other fields are fetched when a game is first added and then updated by hand on report. Prices and review counts therefore reflect the last successful fetch, not real time; every game page links its Steam store page as the authoritative source. One entry (Shin KoiKoi) is not on Steam and was entered by hand from the itch.io page.

How games get on the list

There is no automatic discovery. The site is built from a fixed list of Steam app IDs stored in the site's source repository (128 IDs at the time of this build; 61 of them currently resolve to a published page). A game can only appear here after its app ID is added to that file. The list was put together when the site was first built in April 2026.

Being in the data set is not enough for a page. At build time every entry has to pass four checks — the first three read from the Steam Store appdetails record (the hand-entered itch.io entry is held to the same fields), the fourth from the generated text:

1. Steam's "Indie" genre tag is present. This is Steam's own classification as shown on the store page — not our judgement of the studio's size, funding or publisher.
2. It is a game. Steam's type field must be game; playtests, texture packs, support packages, soundtracks and other add-ons get no page.
3. It has been released. Entries Steam marks as "Coming soon" wait until they are out.
4. Its "Games like" list holds real titles. An entry whose list still contains the pipeline's generic placeholder labels instead of game names gets no page until the labels are gone.

Of the 121 entries in the data set at this build, 62 pass and have a page; 59 do not (counting every failed check: 56 no Steam "Indie" genre tag; 4 not a game (playtest, texture pack, support package, soundtrack or DLC); 2 not released yet ("Coming soon" on Steam)) . The excluded rows are kept in the data set — nothing is deleted — but no page is generated for them, and their former URLs redirect to the closest genre page, or to this section explaining the selection when no genre page covers the entry. The home page, genre pages, RSS feed and sitemap are built from the same filtered list, so an entry that is not on the home page has no page anywhere on this site. Each published page still shows all of its Steam genre tags at the top so you can see the classification for yourself.

How the summaries are written — and what is not verified

The summary, "Good for" list and "Avoid if" list on each game page were drafted by Claude (Anthropic's language model) through Claude Code — interactive sessions and scheduled routines run under the operator's account — from the Steam store data above plus whatever the model already knew about the game. The one exception is Shin KoiKoi: that entry was written by the operator, not drafted by the model — it is the operator's own game, and the page says so in a disclosure box. The games are not individually play-tested for this site, and the notes are not based on anyone playing the game for this site. Treat them as a structured reading of the store page, not as a review.

• "Games like X" lists — where a page shows one (32 of 62 pages), it was drafted by the model from genre tags and store descriptions and has not been individually verified. The other 30 pages have no such list in the data, so they show no "Games like" section at all rather than an invented one.
• "Is this an indie game?" answer — a one-question FAQ derived from two facts only: whether Steam applies the "Indie" genre tag, and whether the publisher appears on our list of major publishers (see Methodology). It is a rule applied to data, not a judgement formed by playing the game.
• Steam reviews — the review counts and positive ratio shown on a game page are the numbers Steam reported when we last fetched the entry; we do not add our own ratings.
• "Page built" dates — the date on each game page is the date of the last automated rebuild, not the date a person read the entry.
• Genre pages open with a short introduction written for this site by the operator with Claude Code; the game cards below it show this site's own summary of each game, not the developer's Steam store description.

If you find a wrong fact — release date, price, developer, publisher, genre tag, or a summary that misdescribes the game — email the address below with the page URL. Factual corrections are made within 14 days of a verifiable report.

Affiliations

We are not affiliated with the developers, publishers or storefronts of the games listed here, with one disclosed exception: Shin KoiKoi is the operator's own game (developed and published by hogwartz.inc) and is labelled as such on its page. Some outbound links to third-party stores are affiliate links (Amazon Associates); see the Affiliate Disclosure. No developer or publisher has paid for a listing, and none has been given a say in what a page says.

Other sites we run

The same operator runs two more directories built with the same pipeline:

• AI Tools Directory — Open-source AI models from HuggingFace
• OSS Alternatives — Self-hostable open-source alternatives to popular SaaS

Contact

Corrections, removal requests, or feedback: [email protected]. The Contact page lists the intake format for corrections, takedowns and bug reports.