Whether you see The Game Awards as a hollow corporate show or an exciting celebration of this year in gaming, you likely missed a bunch of new game announcements that happened during the event. And no, I don’t mean nodding off during Highguard’s reveal.
The Day of the Devs 2025 indie showcase is where all these announcements happened. The showcase streamed online two days before TGA, drawing about 65,000 viewers across the Day of the Devs and TGA channels at the time of writing. That means only three in 1,000 TGA viewers tuned in to watch it.
Day of the Devs offers new and promising indie game developers a free platform to display their games, and the partnership with TGA and Summer Games Fest ensures this happens in front of huge audiences. While the number of people who watched the showcase means most either didn’t hear about Day of the Devs or straight out ignored it, it should’ve been one of the most anticipated moments of the event, as the games featured throughout its 11-year history prove.
Massive indie hits had a spotlight at Day of the Devs
Remember when the Hollow Knight developers were totally anonymous, and nobody knew if their game had any future? Well, I don’t, but the Day of the Devs organizers do, because they showcased Hollow Knight in 2014, three years before the game launched, and 11 years before Silksong was nominated game of the year at TGA.
Other games that Day of the Devs has helped gain visibility and break into the mainstream are Cuphead, Blue Prince, and Cocoon, which were all The Game Awards nominees when they launched. Some memorable gems that didn’t become so popular but are still beloved by indie game fans like myself were also part of the showcase, like Spiritfarer, Untitled Goose Game, and the brutal Getting Over It with Bennet Foddy.
Which Day of the Devs games may dominate 2026
I’m convinced the latest Day of the Devs is hiding the next big indie hit: A game we’ll remember for years to come and that everyone will be praising in 12 months. My crystal ball is broken, so I can’t tell you exactly which game it is, but I have some guesses.
Stretchmancer has the potential to win awards in design and innovation. It kind of gives me Portal vibes, so I also believe it can break into the mainstream if its execution is great. It may be too cartoony and silly for some hardcore—and boring—gamers to take it seriously, but I’m confident about its future. It also seems like the perfect Nintendo Switch 2 game to use the new Joy-Con mouse controls.
Awaysis is on my list to become not a hit with hundreds of thousands of concurrent players, but to be a kind of evergreen game that will come up whenever someone asks what’s a fun game to play with friends on the couch. Like a new Overcooked.
The Dungeon Experience is an extremely weird game in the best sense of the word. You’re guided by a talking crab through a surreal but colorful and funny world full of dungeons. I bet this comedy game will be a hit among Twitch streamers for a few days or weeks. It might just lose in the long run to the co-op physics-based Frog Sqwad.
All I know is that I’m wishlisting it all on Steam, and I hope I have enough time to play them all and say I was a fan before it was cool.
