A recent under-the-hood change to Steam has led to major boosts for many game developers, says Tim Bender, CEO of strategy, sim, and RPG specialist publisher Hooded Horse.

In a lengthy LinkedIn post, Bender backs reports from indie game sleuth Simon Carless showing that visibility on Steam – that is, a game's ability to be found by players and shown in recommendation feeds – has improved considerably for indies in the past few weeks and months.

This seems to be tied to one of Steam's biggest feeds: Discounts & Events. Parked right on the homepage, this feed has evidently been updated to be more player-tailored, spending less space on best-selling hits and devoting more slots to curated recommendations based on your playtime, wishlists, and purchases.

"Suddenly I'm seeing indie gems with less than a hundred to a few thousand reviews included as well, of precisely the sort I love," says Bender. "In other page loads I'm getting pushed things like the Gold Box Dungeons and Dragons games from the late 80s/early 90s, with less than 300 reviews since their Steam rerelease 4 years ago – perfect for me."

Bender shares some data to demonstrate this point. In the past six months, one of Hooded Horse's games saw 7,355 Steam page visits via the Discounts & Events feed. A whopping 7,341 of those came in the last month.

8 visits a month, this feed drove 2,621 times visibility per month after this change from Valve.

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