How this site is made

Data sources

Store facts — name, developer, publisher, genre tags, feature categories, release date, header image and list price — come from Valve's public Steam Store appdetails endpoint. Review counts and Steam's review-score label come from the Steam appreviews summary endpoint. Both are re-fetched by a scheduled job and the site is rebuilt from the result; the About page describes the cadence. No data is bought, scraped from third parties, or typed in by hand, except one entry not on Steam (Shin KoiKoi) whose facts were entered from the itch.io page.

How games are selected

The site is built from a fixed list of Steam app IDs kept in the source repository. A game appears here only when its ID is on that list and it passes the publish checks in the build; there is no automatic discovery and no ranking. At this build 62 games are published, 61 of them from Steam. All 61 carry Steam's "Indie" genre tag, because the publish gate requires it — an entry without the tag stays in the data set and gets no page.

The "Is X an indie game?" rubric

Every game page answers exactly one question, Is {game} an indie game?, and answers it the same way. The rubric uses two inputs only — the game's Steam genre field and its Steam publisher field (for the one entry not on Steam, the hand-entered equivalents, and the page says so) — and returns one of three results:

• Yes — Steam lists the game under the "Indie" genre and its publisher is not on the major-publisher list below (or no publisher is recorded).
• Borderline — Steam lists the game under "Indie" but its publisher is on the list. We show both facts rather than pick a side.
• No — Steam does not list the game under "Indie". The publisher is not consulted.

Each game page prints one sentence of answer plus the fact lines it rests on; this paragraph is the standing explanation those pages link to instead of repeating it. The rubric never states or estimates team size, budget or sales, because the data does not contain them, and it says nothing about a game's quality — it reports how the store page is labelled and who is named as publisher. Steam's "Indie" label is set by whoever publishes the store page, which is why the publisher check exists. Applied to the current data the rubric yields 59 Yes, 3 Borderline and 0 No — No cannot occur in the published set, because the publish gate has already required the "Indie" tag. The Borderline entries areBroken Age, Dust: An Elysian Tail, Rocket League®.

The major-publisher list

"Major publisher" is a judgement about company size, not a legal category, so the whole list is published here with the official page checked for each row and the date it was checked. A company is on the list when the linked source shows at least one of three things: it is a platform holder (it makes a games console or operates a storefront); it publishes through several development studios or publishing labels of its own; or it is the label, division or subsidiary of a larger games company, which the source names. The "Why it is on the list" column has to state which of the three applies — the build fails on a row whose reason does not, so the rubric can never rest on a bare assertion.

The list is maintained by hand and is not exhaustive: it was built from the publishers that appear in this site's own data, and a company is added only when a source can be checked for it. Publishers not on the list are therefore not thereby "small" — they are simply not on it, and their games are answered "Yes" rather than "Borderline". If a publisher should be listed, email [email protected] with a source and it will be added.

Matching is by whole word against the Steam publisher field, so a publisher listed alongside others ("Studio X, Xbox Game Studios") is still recognised.

Who writes the text

The summary, the "Good for" list, the "Avoid if" list and, where present, the "Games like" list were drafted by Claude (Anthropic's language model) through Claude Code, run under the operator's account, from the Steam store data above plus whatever the model already knew about the game. One entry (Shin KoiKoi) was written by the operator instead, and its page says so. Nobody played the games for this site: the notes are a structured reading of the store page and of the model's prior knowledge, not a review. A person has not read every entry; the provenance line under each summary says whether the text was drafted by the model or written by the operator.

What each section of a game page is

• Steam reviews — the total and positive counts and the score label exactly as returned by Steam's review summary at the last refresh, with a link to the Steam page they came from. Shown on 61 of 61 Steam entries; hidden when Steam reports no reviews. We do not collect ratings ourselves.
• Games like {game} — a list of titles drafted by Claude from the game's genre tags and store description, present on 32 of 62 pages. Titles that are also on this site are linked; the rest are plain text. The list is not verified entry by entry, and each page says so in one line under the list. Pages whose data holds no such list show no section at all.
• Good for / Avoid if — model-drafted bullets, as described above.
• Is {game} an indie game? — the rubric above, applied to that game's data.
• At a glance / External resources — Steam fields and outbound links (Steam store, community hub, SteamCharts, HowLongToBeat). We do not record play time or player counts.
• You might also like — the first few other published entries that share at least one Steam genre tag with this one, in list order. It is not a recommendation engine, and nothing about ranking, popularity or quality is implied.

What gets a page, and what is kept out of search

• A game page is marked noindex when it has no "Good for", no "Avoid if" and no "Games like" content — 0 pages at this build. Such pages are also left out of the sitemap.
• A genre page exists only when at least 5 published games carry the tag and an introduction for that genre exists in the source, written for this site by the operator with Claude Code (10 genres have one). Genres that fail either test get no page.
• Data rows are never deleted to make a page disappear; a game that fails a publish check stays in the data set and is simply not built.

Corrections

A wrong store fact, a summary that misdescribes a game, or a publisher that should or should not be on the list above: email [email protected] with the page URL and a source. The Contact page lists the intake format.