Indie developers and cloud — the catalogue conversation nobody is having

Game Pass Cloud catalogue: roughly 300 titles, heavily weighted toward AAA and second-tier studio releases. Indie representation is improving but still under-indexed relative to Steam's indie share.

PS Plus Premium catalogue: heavily console-AAA, with curated indie inclusions (the 'Premium' tier classics). Smaller indie catalogue than Game Pass.

GeForce Now: BYO-library, so the indie catalogue is whatever Steam, Epic, and GOG have. In practice this is excellent for indie because the user's Steam library is the catalogue.

Boosteroid, Luna: smaller catalogues, predominantly licensed AAA. Almost no indie presence.

A meaningful fraction of cloud gaming subscribers play indies. Hades, Vampire Survivors, Stardew Valley, Balatro, Among Us, Cuphead — these are titles that subscribers actively want to play on cloud, and the marquee cloud services either have them prominently or don't.

Inclusion in a cloud gaming catalogue is real distribution. Game Pass Cloud surfacing Vampire Survivors to its subscriber base was a meaningful chunk of that title's audience growth — the discoverability was better than Steam's algorithmic surfacing for many players.

But the path for an indie developer to get included is opaque. Microsoft has a Game Pass indie pipeline. Sony has selective curation for PS Plus Extra/Premium. NVIDIA's GeForce Now doesn't curate at all (everyone with a Steam title gets in). The structural environment for indies is wildly different across services.

Transparent indie inclusion criteria from Game Pass and PS Plus. Currently the process is back-channel deals, and small developers don't have the relationships. A published criteria document with predictable inclusion windows would change the indie ecosystem.

An 'indie tier' or curated indie collection on the major cloud services. Game Pass has done something like this with 'Game Pass Indie Showcase' marketing events but not as a persistent product category. The audience for an indie-focused cloud tier exists and isn't being served.

Better revenue sharing for cloud-streamed indie play. The publisher revenue share on Game Pass Cloud for an indie title is typically lower than the equivalent share on a Steam sale. The economics push indies away from cloud catalogue inclusion even when the audience is there.

Cloud gaming services market AAA because AAA titles are what drive subscription decisions. The marquee announcement of 'Starfield on Game Pass day one' moves more subscribers than 'three new indies added to Game Pass'. The marketing focus is rational.

But the retention story is different. The subscriber who renews month over month is often playing indies more than AAA — the AAA title is finished in 60 hours and then the subscriber needs something to keep them engaged. Indies are the retention play, and the services aren't treating them as such.

GeForce Now's BYO-library model effectively sidesteps the problem — Steam's indie discovery does the work and GFN inherits it. Catalogue services have to actively curate and they're under-investing.

Ship on Steam. GeForce Now will pick it up automatically if you opt in. This is the lowest-effort path to cloud distribution.

Cultivate Game Pass relationships if your title fits the Game Pass audience. The deal pipeline is real and the marketing exposure is meaningful when it lands.

Don't optimise for cloud specifically. The cloud user is the same person as the local user; the title that works for one works for the other. The exception is titles with very specific input requirements (frame-tight platforming, competitive twitch shooters) that suffer on cloud and should be marketed accordingly.

I'd forecast that by 2027, at least one major cloud gaming service launches a dedicated indie catalogue tier — separate from the AAA-focused main tier, priced lower, curated. The audience for this is real and underserved.

Most likely candidate is Microsoft with a 'Game Pass Indie' offshoot, possibly bundled with a creator-tooling story. Least likely is Sony, where the strategic posture is heavier on AAA exclusives.

If it doesn't happen by 2027, it'll be a missed opportunity that becomes visible in retention numbers the services don't publish.