You want to help the people making the games you love, and your bank account has opinions about that. Good news: the things that actually help a small studio are mostly free, and most of them take less time than reading the patch notes you scroll past.
The catch is that they feel too small to matter, so people skip them. They matter. Here's the mechanism behind each one, so you can stop treating them as guilt tasks and start treating them as the leverage they are.
Wishlist the game before it launches
A wishlist looks like a bookmark. To a storefront, it's a signal.
Platforms use wishlist counts to decide who gets shown to more people. A game climbing toward release with a healthy pile of wishlists gets nudged into more "upcoming" and "popular" slots, which gets more wishlists, which gets more slots. It's a small snowball, and you're free snow.
The timing part is the bit nobody mentions. Wishlists you add before launch are worth more than a purchase two months later, because the day a game releases, the store fires off a notification to everyone who wishlisted it. That first-day spike is what pushes a game onto the front-page charts, and the charts are where players who've never heard of the game find it. You are, in effect, scheduling a tiny bit of free marketing to go off at the exact moment it counts most.
So if you see an indie game that looks interesting and you're not sure you'll buy it, wishlist it anyway. Future-you can always ignore the notification. Present-you just voted.
Leave a review, even a two-line one
Most people write a review when they're furious or when they've just finished something and feel emotional about it. The vast quiet middle — people who liked a game fine and moved on — write nothing. That's the gap you can fill.
Review count feeds the same recommendation machinery as wishlists. A game needs to cross certain review thresholds before the store starts trusting its rating enough to surface it, and before it earns things like an "Overwhelmingly Positive" tag that does genuine persuading. For a small game, the difference between eleven reviews and a hundred is the difference between looking abandoned and looking alive.
You don't need to write an essay. "Great little puzzle game, the soundtrack alone was worth it" is a complete, useful review. What makes it useful isn't length, it's specificity — a sentence that tells the next person what kind of good it is helps them decide, and a review that helps someone decide is a review the store likes to show.
One honest thing: a fair critical review helps too. "Loved it but the last third drags" is more valuable to a developer than blank five stars, because it's information they can use and it makes the positive reviews look real.
Tell exactly one person who'd like it
Not "share it with the world." Tell one person, by name, who you specifically think would enjoy it.
This works because of how discovery actually happens. A stranger seeing your public post scrolls past it, because strangers scroll past everything. But when you message a friend "this is exactly your kind of thing," you've done the one thing no algorithm can do — you've made a personal recommendation from someone whose taste they already trust. That converts. It's the reason word of mouth still finds good indie games better than any storefront ever has.
The targeting is the whole trick. A game about running a tiny bakery lands very differently when sent to your friend who reorganises their spice rack for fun than when broadcast to two hundred followers with mixed interests. One aimed recommendation beats a dozen scattershot ones.
And it compounds. If your one person loves it and tells their one person, you've started something that doesn't need you anymore.
Follow the developer and reshare their stuff
Small studios post into the void constantly. A trailer, a gif of a bug that turned out funnier than the game, a launch date. Most of it reaches almost no one, because their follower count is small and the algorithm rewards accounts that are already big — a system with the warmth of a bank deciding you can only borrow money if you can prove you don't need it.
Following costs you nothing and gives their next post a slightly wider floor. Resharing does more: it borrows your reach, however modest, and lends it to someone who has none. A reshare from an account with fifty followers still puts the game in front of fifty people who trust that account, which is fifty more than it had.
The best time to do this is when they post something and it's clearly not landing. Three likes on a trailer they were obviously nervous about. That's the post to boost. You're not just adding a number, you're keeping someone from concluding that nobody cares.
If you follow creators who cover small games, that's another quiet lever — the right people amplifying a game reach players you never could.
What to do after you've actually played it
Buying the game is the obvious support, but the free stuff doesn't stop at the purchase — it starts there, because now you have something real to say.
Report bugs properly instead of just leaving a one-star review that says "broken." A clear description of what you did and what happened is a gift to a developer who can't reproduce a crash they've been chasing for a week. You're doing free QA, and the good ones genuinely notice.
Engage where they can see it. Answering another player's question in a forum, posting a screenshot of a moment you loved, showing up in a community that would otherwise be empty — all of it makes the game look played, and "looks played" is contagious. Nobody wants to buy into a ghost town.
Which of these should you actually do?
If you can do exactly one thing, wishlist before launch and review after. Those two feed the machinery that decides whether a game gets seen at all, and they bookend the game's life at the two moments the store is paying most attention.
If you've got a bit more energy, add the one targeted recommendation, because that's the one that reaches a human instead of a system, and humans are the ones who actually buy things.
The reason any of this is worth your five minutes is the reason indie games are worth your time in the first place — the whole ecosystem runs on small margins and word of mouth, so small actions land harder here than they ever would on a game with a marketing department the size of a town.
Start with the wishlist. Go to your library, find one small game you've been meaning to try, and add it now, before you talk yourself out of it as too minor to bother with. That was the whole point.
Common questions
Does wishlisting a game I never buy still help the developer?
Yes. The wishlist itself is a signal to the store's recommendation system regardless of whether you buy later, and if you added it before launch, it counted toward that first-day visibility spike. You're not obligated to buy anything you wishlist.
Do short reviews count as much as long ones?
For the store's counting purposes, a short review counts exactly the same as a long one — a review is a review. For the next player deciding whether to buy, a short, specific review often reads as more trustworthy than a long emotional one, so don't feel you need to write an essay to be useful.
Is it worth reviewing a game long after release?
Absolutely. Reviews don't expire, and a steady trickle of them over time keeps a game looking active rather than finished. A late review can also reach exactly the person who's discovering the game for the first time, which is when a recommendation matters most.
What if I have almost no followers — is resharing pointless?
No. A small account resharing still puts the game in front of everyone who follows you, and those people trust you specifically. Reach isn't the only thing that matters; a recommendation from someone whose taste a person knows converts far better than a big anonymous impression.