The Heat Index
One board, rebuilt every day from live player data: what is actually hot in Steam indies and Roblox right now, and how fast it is moving.
| # | Game | Platform | Players now | Heat |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | WARDOGS by BULKHEAD · official page | Steam | 245,205 | 100 |
| 2 | Blox Fruits by Gamer Robot Inc · official page | Roblox | 140,081 | 100 |
| 3 | Rivals by Nosniy Games · official page | Roblox | 112,226 | 98 |
| 4 | Valheim by Iron Gate AB · official page | Steam | 78,325 | 92 |
| 5 | Rust by Facepunch Studios · official page | Steam | 60,657 | 91 |
| 6 | Wallpaper Engine by Wallpaper Engine Team · official page | Steam | 49,780 | 91 |
| 7 | Slay the Spire 2 by Mega Crit · official page | Steam | 51,205 | 90 |
| 8 | Dress to Impress by Dress To Impress Group · official page | Roblox | 41,379 | 90 |
| 9 | Stardew Valley by ConcernedApe · official page | Steam | 39,884 | 89 |
| 10 | Geometry Dash by RobTop Games · official page | Steam | 44,155 | 87 |
How the board works
The Steam side starts from Steam's own most-played chart. We check the top of that chart title by title and keep only the games Steam itself tags with the Indie genre, then rank them by peak players. The Roblox side tracks a curated watchlist of the platform's biggest experiences and pulls their live playing, visit, and favorite counts from Roblox's public game stats.
Heat is a per-platform score from 0 to 100, scaled on a logarithm: the biggest title on each platform scores 100, and every other title is measured against it by orders of magnitude rather than raw counts, so a game with a tenth of the leader's players lands near 90, not 10. Steam heat uses peak players on the current chart; Roblox heat uses players in game right now. The two lists are then merged and sorted by heat into one board. A game can be enormous and cooling, or small and detonating; the board is built to surface the second kind early, because that is where the next spawn is coming from.
Every game on the board is credited to its developer and linked to its official store page. If we have a number wrong, the developer link is right there: check the source.
Creator-Built Games Watch
Games built or published by creators for their own audiences, a category no other chart maintains.
Animal Well
Creator: videogamedunkey (publisher: Bigmode)
Developer: Billy Basso
The proof of concept for creator-as-publisher: a celebrated indie launched under a YouTuber's own label.
Kong Royale
Creator: Max Blade (@_MaxBlade)
Developer: Max Blade
A 50-player battle royale vibe-coded in three weeks with a swarm of AI agents ('hive coding'), launched with a live playtest for his audience on Oct 15, 2026. The creator-built pattern, live.