One day, I just woke up and couldn't open the Steam page for my game:

Guild Simulator on Steam or search 'steam 4229060'

• On the game page in Steamworks, I saw the message: "APP HAS BEEN RETIRED." (4th screen)

• There were no details about it in Steamworks.

Through some investigation, I was able to find a message from [email protected] on my previously used email. (They use your Steamworks Partner email, which doesn't automatically update with changes made to your Steam account)

This was a DMCA claim that banned my game from Steam (5th image), i was shocked: no evidence, no explanation, etc.—just the claim was enough.
It was from my competitors.

Steam's DMCA support also provides clear instructions on the counter-claim process:

• You basically say, "No, this is not a valid DMCA claim" and provide full info about yourself to the claimant (full name, address, etc.).

• After that, 10 business days must pass, and ONLY IF the claimant does not take legal action against you, your game will be reinstated. (This is what happens in most cases, and it's how it worked for me.)

A DMCA claim doesn't have to be valid to proceed with the deletion of your content. The claimant doesn't need any proof to take down your page and start the process.

In other words, if someone big sets their sights on you, they could start legal action against you, and your Steam page is basically dead

During that time, your game will be deleted from Steam. For me, that meant a loss of about 25% of my wishlists.

If you like the screenshots I've shared, please check out my game on Steam and add it to your wishlist—it would help a lot!

I've long abandoned the indie space, I find many indie games to be visually impressive but as uninviting as it gets when it comes to their gameplay.

Being 41 and having grown up with actual retro games, the majority of my favorites were neither overly difficult nor filled with endless tedious mechanics.

Indie developers seem to want to put complexity and tedium before simple, pure fun.

For every Vengeful Guardian, Blazing Chrome and Tanuki Justice, we have 20 rogues and 15 survival games. Are these genres really that enjoyable? Because every time I've tried getting into these games I've felt like I was forcing myself to play them and I was.

Even a well crafted and beautiful game such as Hades, IMO would have been better off as a short but sweet action game with RPG elements than a rogue. I have zero desire to go back to that game in spite of its visuals and combat being top notch. Yet I have no problems replaying many of my favorite retro games.

I never go back to Fight 'n Rage, a beat em up that while visually impressive has no idea how to be a beat em up, but rather complicates things by making fighting game mechanics and combos almost mandatory. But I gladly go back to my Arcade and console 16bit favorite beat em ups and some of my NES favorites too.
I've given up on any and all arcade racing indie games because to indie developers adding complicated nonsense like mandatory drift mechanics is somehow more fun than to just make a nice, smooth, fun and fast paced arcade racer like Horizon Chase Turbo for example.

Overly high difficulty levels, that pretend to be doing it because apparently retro games were like that, complexity added for the sake of complexity, endless rogue elements implemented and mixed into every genre possible.

Where's the fun?

Remember? Just pure fun? When games were not a chore to play?

I mean I still play such games and the occasional indie game that comes out and does things right, but the oversaturation of all sorts of mechanics upon mechanics being mixed and combined and games that keep introducing themselves as "<insert genre here> ROGUE LIKE/Lite" is just too much IMO.

Sometimes it's ok to make an hour long game which doesn't torment the player by making the game start over from the beginning, it's fun to replay a simple beat em up, platformer or shmup. I don't need randomly generated levels or death restarting my entire game from the beginning. So few games did that back in the day.

I don't need games like Cuphead which are made to be brutally difficult because apparently that's how retro games were, you know the 5 retro games that actually were that way on the NES, nevermind the 50 that were not.

I’ve been messing around with this idea for a bit after playing Meccha Chameleon.

It’s Prop Hunt except instead of turning into a prop, you get a 3D modeling tool and have to make the prop yourself.

It’s very early and definitely pretty janky, but my friends and I have been having quite a bit of fun playing it.

Also very interested in anything that breaks / makes no sense, its still pretty early (itch link in comments).

Hi, everyone. I recently added a new boss to my 2D platformer.

I'd love to get some feedback on the art and animations. I'd appreciate it if you could share your thoughts in the comments.

I hope you enjoy this boss. And no, I didn't take any illegal substances while creating it. I just have a vivid imagination!

I made a short video comparing how a simple task looks in Python vs C++.

Not trying to start a language war 😅 just curious…

💬 Which one gives YOU more pain?

🟩 Python

🟥 C++

What's the worst language conversion you've ever done?

Been curious about what I can do with that old-school tap to flap between pipes thing, so I had LingGuang throw together the framework, like the pipes, physics, scoring system and all.

First go was brutal, dead in seconds. Now I get why everyone hates this game but keeps smashing that screen anyway. It's like dark souls of iphone games.

Then I took over for the fun part and spent some time tweaking it myself. Swapped the bird for a chubby flying pig cuz its just hilarious, widened the gaps and slowed the scroll speed so it’s not instant death, and added some little touches like screen shake.

I recently added a new weapon, the 'Submachine Gun.' I haven't added the sound files yet, but I wanted to show how it feels in-game, so I uploaded it.