Steam Flood 🎮, Engine Disasters 💥, Anti-Cheat Fog 🕵️‍♂️, Unity DI 👨‍💻
🎮 Industry & Market Watch
Steam 2025: 19,000 New Games, But Most Go Unnoticed
SteamDB’s latest stats show 2025 as Steam’s busiest year ever, with over 19,000 games released—but nearly half attracted fewer than 10 user reviews. Around 2,200 titles received no reviews at all, while only about 6.2% of releases surpassed 500 reviews, a rough benchmark for real visibility. At the same time, Steam’s estimated game revenue hit a record $16.2B in just eleven months. The result is a platform that’s commercially thriving, yet brutally competitive for smaller developers.
From Zero to Published Island: Learning Fortnite UEFN Fast
Curious about making games inside Fortnite? This talk breaks down how UEFN, devices, and Verse let you prototype and ship multiplayer experiences without touching low-level engine plumbing. It showcases Epic’s “Your First Island” and other example templates, explains live edit and Creator Portal publishing, and highlights advanced resources like scene graph, UI samples, lighting templates, and Patchwork audio. If you want a guided on-ramp to Fortnite creation and its built-in audience, this is it.
🧠Game Design & Analysis
Boss Keys Dissects Hollow Knight: Silksong’s Three-Act Metroidvania Masterclass
Mark Brown’s latest Boss Keys episode offers a deep design breakdown of Hollow Knight: Silksong’s world, from Pharloom’s seemingly linear climb to the Citadel’s open hub and Act 3’s corrupted remix. He maps abilities, shortcuts, and sequence breaks that let players skip bosses, find alternate routes, and shape their own progression. With more optional bosses than mandatory ones and enormous build variety, the video doubles as a blueprint for designing non-linear yet coherent Metroidvania worlds.
Inside Mafia: The Old Country’s AAA MetaHuman Character Pipeline
Discover how Mafia: The Old Country turned MetaHuman from a tech demo into a full production workhorse. Hangar 13 walks through their hero head pipeline from scan to ZBrush polish, then contrasts it with a faster NPC workflow built entirely in MetaHuman Creator. They share lessons from building a hybrid groom/card hair system, managing wrinkle maps and eye shaders, and aggressively optimizing LODs. If you’re wondering how to ship hundreds of MetaHumans in a UE5 game, this talk shows you how.
🛠️ Engine, Tools & Technical Tricks
8 Legendary Game Engine Mistakes That Burned Developers Hard
Walk through a greatest-hits list of game engine failures, including Unity’s retroactive runtime fees, BuildBox’s shocking 70/30 revenue split, and GameMaker’s DRM that corrupted legitimate games. The article also touches on EA’s long history of damaging engine and studio decisions, Autodesk’s habit of buying and killing dev tools, and Amazon’s failed Lumberyard push. CryEngine’s mismanagement rounds out the set as a classic "what could have been", making this a sharp reminder that engine choice is as much about company behavior as technology.
Killing Wallhacks at the Source: CCP’s Fog of War in Unreal
CCP Games shows how to defeat wall hacks by design with a server-side “Fog of War” system built for EVE Vanguard. In this Unreal Fest Stockholm talk, they explain how the server only replicates what each player can legitimately see—no line of sight means no data at all. The session walks through the problem, their solution, and how it ties into Unreal Engine’s replication graph, offering concrete ideas for fair, cheat-resistant multiplayer.
🚀 Dev Workflow & Career Paths
Killing Singletons in Unity: Practical Dependency Injection with Init(args)
If your Unity project is drowning in singletons and fragile execution order, this deep dive into Init(args) is a breath of fresh air. The creator walks through turning a classic GameManager singleton into a service, injecting it safely into players, and expanding into interface-based services, scoped local services, and runtime value providers. You’ll also see handy editor tools like the Service Debugger and cross-scene reference IDs in action. It’s a practical blueprint for modern Unity architecture.
From YouTube Burnout to Shipping Small Games: Indie Devs Plan 2026
Indie dev YouTubers Thomas Stewart and Marnix (BiteMe Games) look back on a chaotic 2025—falling YouTube views, rising game income, and the hard limits of time, family, and energy. They break down how BiteMe shipped three small games (including hit anomaly horror Kyoto Anomaly), why localization and non‑US markets matter, and why YouTube is no longer the priority. The big takeaway: shrink scope, ship more often, and treat 2026 as the year of small, focused games.