What indie game launches actually look like.
Three separate corpora. Two hundred launch outcomes, plus a hundred survival games. No overlap. No claim that any of this causes a hit.
Three lists. Zero overlap. No causality.
Observation date: 17 August 2026 (PT). Source fields are the store page, Steam APIs, SteamSpy and SteamCharts as recorded that day. Missing values stay missing — they are not treated as absences.
The low-review cohort is games with fewer than 50 reviews in all languages, targeted at 10–49. 99/100 sit in that band. Where the Water Tastes Like Wine stays in the cohort as a documented commercial failure (1,740 reviews).
The high-review cohort is ≥1,000 reviews. Survival is selected by genre taxonomy, not by review band, and is never joined to the 200 to invent a “300 launches” figure.
Limits
- Wishlist counts are almost never public. We do not estimate Valve’s counter.
- Next Fest, creator and press columns are majority unobserved on the new rows.
- Demo means “still listed on 17 August 2026”, not launch-day history.
- Review count is not sales. Association is not a cause.
Research feeds the launch work.
Store-page signals go to the page engagement. Velocity and calendar go to launch planning. Genre matching goes to Creator Match.