Started playing a few indie titles on PC, or at least titles that I would not normally be able to find without digging a bit (Sea of Stars, Hollow Knight, Garden Story, etc). Finding games that are made by smaller studios is a little (not much, but a little) harder than finding “Top Sellers” on Steam. I have tried Steam’s “niche” Recommender, which has helped find some cool titles.
However, I am wondering if there is something that would be equivalent to what E3 was, but for Indie titles? Either some online showcase that doesn’t rely on the Steam Curator system, or even something hosted in person with actual demos like E3. Does anything like this exist?
EDIT: Thank you for the answers! Steam Next Fest, the YouTubers listed below (thank you again!), gamescom, and itch.io all work great for what I was looking for.
Seriously? Hollow Knight is/was a huge hit. The other ones I’ve heard of before by word of mouth.
You can easily find indie games on Steam when you browse by any method. The ones of major devs will be obvious recognizable names. Even on the front page of the Steam store, it looks about a third of them are indie games.
Or you could look at other stores like GOG or Indiegala.
It is true, the gap between Hollow Knight and the other two is large (Steam Reviews as source, and general ease of finding it). But even finding something like Hollow Knight was something that conveniently popped up through either a Curator or in Specials at one point for me (can’t remember for certain).
Growing up, if a game was not something that showed up at E3 or was mentioned by a friend (and then later, showing up on Steam’s Specials or Top Selling), I never played or heard of it. And Steam is good, but I guess I was looking for something that targeted Indie games in particular, and if there existed a yearly showcase or event that was dedicated to Indies.
Hadn’t considered GOG or heard of Indiegala though, thank you for the reference!
Oh yeah, curators is the other one I wanted to mention but couldn’t remember.
Steam does have indie events, but really you won’t find anything there you can’t find just by browsing the store pages.
You can also hear of a lot of games just by being in game communities like here on Lemmy.
And don’t forget about games outside the major stores.