Despite all the external challenges, Kaleiki still feels "there's not much we can do there with the budget" and "the most important thing is the game has to be good." That's because, according to him, "Valve does a very good job of surfacing games that players like or that players are enjoying" and "the algorithm is almost impenetrable."
"If you watch some indie dev videos, they'll often say we tried hacking the algorithm, we tried doing all these goofy things, and there's not much you can do," he said. "All you can really do is make a good game, which, in a lot of ways, is good news for us, but also this is really hard because there's no little hacks you can do to surface your game like you could 20 years ago. "
I mean, he's got a super valid take here, but also, like.... There's tons of pretty damn good games on Steam, a lot of them very kind of unknown and underrated for how fun they actually are.
Further, you're not just competing with current "good games" you're also competing with classic "good games.*
According to certain sources, there's over 100,000 games in the US Valve game store in 2025.
Over one hundred thousand games.
That's still a rough number of games to be up against, even if only a quarter of them are "good games."