EVERY 7 MINUTES

Franco E. Pacho

If you scroll through Twitter Gamedev, you can find a new unique indie games you have never heard of every 7 minutes, or at least that’s what Dave Oshry, micro-celebrity and CEO of New Blood Interactive—publisher of indie titles like Gloomwood, Dusk, and ULTRAKILL—held as a motto before he left social media to fully embrace life as a responsible CEO, husband and father. That made certain smaller gameDev and other accounts in the indie space share all sorts of unique games. Among them all there was an indie GTA set in Türkiye (ALATURKA), an indie Splinter Cell (No Sun To Worship), an indie Silent Hill for the Gays and Lesbians; Signa-no, not that one (Sorry We’re Closed), an indie Dredge but with a truck instead (Truckful) wait no… Dredge is already an indie, but you get the idea. He would share all kinds of games from all genres, with only the phrase “EVERY 7 MINUTES” or some iteration of it. Of course, it was not every 7 minutes, that would’ve been mental, but still he regularly bumped the visibility of games other than their own.

Later, he had to change the gimmick a bit since someone on twitter took profound offense about it on behalf of it being “Vagueposting”. For those who are not familiar with the term, Vagueposting: someone reposts something with incomplete thoughts that only infer something, mainly used to farm interactions. People who couldn’t stop three seconds to think before starting asking “WHAT HAPPENS EVERY 7 MINUTES”, personally started attacking him. Still, he remained unphased (mostly), and kept sharing games.

I know this because at some point, the EVERY 7 MINUTES ritual gained enough traction that made people wishlist games featured in the posts. Eventually “El Oshcuro”, as the streets call him, asked if someone would take on the role to make a curator list tracking these little unheard games so people would easily find all of them, instead of looking through past tweets. By now you might guess who took upon that role and now is the admin behind that curator list. This changed my algorithm in twitter completely. Now I see a game I’ve never heard of in less than 7 minutes! I got flooded with indie games; GameDev sharing their WIPS and people talking about them. Yeah, yeah cool and all, Where am I going with this? Am I vagueposting with this hook article??? I’M TELLING A STORY HERE! Let me finish.

As I was saying before I interrupted myself to do a quick break and change of pace to make the reader aware I’m done with the article’s introductory paragraph, I started seeing a lot of indie games and the discussion around them; the good, the bad, and the ugly. While some people shared and commented on the games, others just were a tad more mean about it, with snarky remarks on the artstyle, the premise, or found the game derivative, the latter complaint was the one that stuck with me the most: a post in all caps “THE SAME FIVE GAMES, INDIE DEVS MAKE THE SAME FIVE GAMES”, berating a fast paced FPS with hand-drawn artstyle (FERRA) which developed into a topic about why everyone is making:

a PSX Survival Horror.
a Boomer Shooter ULTRAKILL clone.
a deckbuilder roguelike.
a JRPG about depression.
a precise input platformer.

There were a lot of opinionated—I would rather use other words, but keeping it PG—people that kept bashing developers for always doing the same thing nowadays, in their eyes, almost no one was taking risks. Now, If you remember the examples at the start of this article, you can back me up when I say this is completely false… well not entirely. It stuck with me the most because it was true to some degree.

While adding new games for people to wishlist or buy if released to the curator list, I always do my research so I can write something cool about the game I’m about to log: The gameplay, the vibe, what it reminded me off, something to hype the game I was writing about in a genuine way; not to brag buuuuut sometimes I even came up with some clever copy phrase. That said, I started hitting a wall once the list grew. I started to find more and more similar games to the point I was not being able to write something unique for the game with the information I gathered, it’s not that I didn’t want the list to feel samey, but it was rather difficult to write something that showed my excitement to share that game in an authentic way. There is so little information available for some games and with so many games being developed it’s not hard for the more mainstream and attention grabbing genres to drown out the others. For every base building-sim I find I have to shovel through at least 30 “friendslop” games or retro Survival Horror, so yeah, point for the opinionated in that regard.

Now, I am not saying indie developers are not creative or that they should stop developing the game they want to do. I only present the problem of how hard it is to connect with your target audience in a social network ruined by interaction, existing on a time where the overall conversation around games has fallen into a pit of cynicism and pseudo-intellectualization of gaming discourse; and this is not counting the gamer-gate grifters spewing hate to every game they can, ew.

Because if my FyP on twitter where everything is indie games, new releases, and people talking about games gets skewed if I minimally interact with something out of that space—in this case it was because of Obsession (2026) amazing movie, watch it—I can’t imagine how hard it would be for a game from a niche genre to reach its target audience, or what it would look like for someone that enjoys indie games but does not actively search for them, Well, probably that person would only see the same five game genres. Damn. 0-2 for the opinionated.

I truly enjoy sharing these indie hidden gems to more people. So from my experience, my advice as someone that sees a lot of them on a daily basis.

For small devs:

Show authenticity. Post your process, your thoughts. Your core mechanic, if you only post about “Hey I did a new prop for my environment” or “Im doing a retro FPS”, well, that is cool, but you are not inviting your potential audience with broad strokes.
Talk about the story.

Show how the thing you are currently working on connects with your core mechanics.
If your game has a main “gimmick” please, show and explain how it shakes the genre.
Don’t be afraid to break the rules and be yourself, don’t follow the marketing rules for industry games if you are indie.
Show art, snippets, teasers. Visuals are a powerful tool to grab people’s attention.

TLDR: Play your strengths, break some rules. You can’t compete if you don’t pick the race you are running.

For gamers:

Stop feeding the cycle of negativity around games, maybe they are making one of the same 5 games cause they truly love one of those 5 games genres. Stop trying to be the nichiest of them all, better enjoy what you like without thinking games get spoiled when they get popular. People are building more outside of the same 5 games. Seek and you’ll find, trust me, you’ll do. Share the game, help an indie dev out. It won’t destroy your impeccable social image.

TLDR: Gaming is a hobby, hobbies are meant to be fun. Get invested in it. Share the love.

Well that is all for me, ending with a happy note of an ideal world where we help indie devs reach new audiences. And we take a more proactive stance into finding the things we really like in the hobby we all love. Remember, Steamfest rules, Gamepass is your friend, wishlist games, follow EVERY 7 MINUTES steam curator list to find hidden indie gems! You won’t regret it! It gets updated regularly by a devilish handsome writer.