We Love Every Game: Steam Hidden-Gem Discovery Tool Takes On 21,000 Annual Releases

Enter We Love Every Game (stylized with a heart in its logo), a discovery platform built by a tiny Boston-based startup called Totally Human Media. Originally profiled in a June 2025 PCWorld interview by Michael Crider and updated in October 2026 as the service expanded its toolkit, the project is led by CEO Ichiro Lambe and head of marketing Matt Martindale. Their goal is as ambitious as it is daunting: fix the top of the PC gaming discovery funnel so players can unearth hidden gems and indie studios can survive long enough to make their next title.

From Steam Labs to Indie Heartbreak: Why Ichiro Lambe Built a New Engine​

To understand why We Love Every Game exists, it helps to look at who is building it. Ichiro Lambe is not an outsider throwing stones at Valve’s algorithms; he helped build them. A 30-year industry veteran, Lambe founded two studios—one that eventually became Sony Online Entertainment Denver, and an independent studio called Dejobaan Games. Along the way, he experimented with early discovery tools, including an automated Twitter bot named Microtrailers that generated six-second video clips whenever a new Steam game launched.

That work caught Valve’s attention. In 2018, Valve brought Lambe on as an external consultant to co-found Steam Labs, the experimental incubator dedicated to improving how players find games on the storefront. Yet even with decades of launch consulting and firsthand experience inside Valve’s discovery apparatus, Lambe hit a wall with his own studio.

In early 2024, he shut down Dejobaan Games. As he candidly told PCWorld, the studio’s releases were generally well-received by players, receiving positive "thumbs up" reviews, yet they "sank without a trace." That bitter reality—that a developer can make a genuinely good PC game and still fail purely due to invisibility—became the catalyst for Totally Human Media. As Polygon later noted in December 2025 when covering Lambe's broader public reflections on the market, he has consistently argued that a storefront like Steam is fundamentally built to process purchases rather than solve initial discovery for every niche title.

Section Summary:

• The Scale Problem: Steam saw over 21,000 releases in 2025 (about 58 per day), making organic visibility brutal for smaller studios.
• The Insider Perspective: Founder Ichiro Lambe co-founded Valve’s Steam Labs as a consultant in 2018 before closing his own indie studio, Dejobaan Games, when positively reviewed titles failed to find an audience.

How "We Love Every Game" Works: Heuristics, Spotlights, and Mechanics​

How do you filter tens of thousands of PC games without burying the very indie titles you are trying to rescue? At the time of the initial interview, Lambe explained that We Love Every Game relied on a straightforward baseline heuristic for its core recommendations:

1. At least 80 percent positive player reviews on Steam.
2. A minimum of 30 total user reviews.
3. A price greater than $0 (specifically when generating guides for events like the Steam Summer Sale, so free-to-play titles aren't mistakenly flagged as discounted).

As any seasoned PC gamer or developer will immediately spot, even a simple 30-review threshold carries a catch-22: brand-new or ultra-niche games that haven't yet reached 30 reviews can still get caught outside the velvet rope. Lambe acknowledged that strict review scores shouldn't permanently stand between a player and a game they might love, noting that standard personalized recommendation engines frequently misjudge player tastes.

To bridge that gap, We Love Every Game has evolved into a multi-pronged discovery hub. A look at the platform’s current web offerings and PCWorld’s October 2026 update shows how Totally Human Media splits its coverage:

Connecting the Mechanical Dots​

Beyond simple Steam tags, marketing lead Matt Martindale pointed out a major blind spot in how storefronts categorize games: underlying psychological and mechanical hooks. Storefronts know if you play Real-Time Strategy (RTS) games, but they rarely understand why.

Martindale used himself as an example, noting that his favorite aspect of RTS titles is base building—the exact mechanical thread that led him to love automation hits like Factorio and Satisfactory. Similarly, he compared Pokémon and Elden Ring, arguing that despite massive aesthetic and genre differences, both revolve around hitting difficulty gates and training up to overcome them. Because digital storefronts lack the nuance to map those cross-genre bridges, players often rely on luck, word of mouth, or long-form YouTube essays to realize a game in an unfamiliar genre actually scratches their exact itch.

Section Summary:

• The Baseline Filter: Early recommendation tools used an 80% positive / 30-review minimum heuristic, though the site also maintains an "Every Single Launch" section and daily thematic spotlights.
• Beyond Basic Tags: The team aims to connect games by shared player motivations (like base-building or progression gates) rather than rigid traditional genre boxes.

The "Farmers' Market" Funnel and the Generative AI Dilemma​

In Lambe’s view, buying games follows a classic three-stage sales funnel:

1. Top of the Funnel (Awareness): Realizing a game exists in the first place.
2. Middle of the Funnel (Interest): Watching streams, reading trusted reviews, and researching gameplay.
3. Bottom of the Funnel (Purchase): Buying and downloading the software.

According to Lambe, Steam and console storefronts like the Nintendo eShop have already perfected the bottom of the funnel, and content creators and journalists handle the middle well—if a player already knows what title to search for. The catastrophic failure point is at the very top: initial awareness.

Lambe compares his ideal top-of-funnel experience to walking through a farmers’ market. Instead of forcing users to navigate heavy interfaces or commit 15 minutes to testing something out, the platform should offer rapid, bite-sized "tastes"—a one-second conceptual hook or a fast-scrolling feed akin to Reddit or TikTok—coupled with user-adjustable controls. Casual users could let the feed run automatically, mid-core players could toggle genres in and out, and power users could filter down to hyper-specific tag combinations (such as "hidden object" plus "cats," something tools like SteamDB already support under the hood, though with a more utilitarian interface).

Can You Automate Coverage of 20,000+ Games Without "Glue on Your Pizza"?​

Here is where any veteran IT professional’s skepticism radar starts pinging. How does a "teeny-tiny Boston startup" summarize 20,000 to 30,000 annual releases? The answer involves automation and generative AI, such as ChatGPT—a topic Lambe approached with refreshing bluntness.

Asked by PCWorld whether he trusts generative AI to summarize human-written game information for players, Lambe replied flatly: "I don’t trust it at all!" Referencing the infamous early AI search blunders ("Do I want glue on my pizza? No."), Lambe and Martindale explained that they do not use AI to ingest massive articles or invent unsupervised reviews. Instead, Martindale noted they build strict framework templates to extract tiny, structured snippets of existing information—such as identifying that a title is a four-player co-op PvE game similar to Deep Rock Galactic—and then link directly to the Steam store page, human-written articles, or gameplay streams. Even on We Love Every Game’s own "About" page, the founders openly poke fun at generic AI corporate-speak.

Whether template-constrained AI summaries can remain consistently accurate across tens of thousands of obscure indie launches remains an open question, but keeping the summaries brief and immediately routing users to primary sources is a sensible guardrail.

Section Summary:

• Fixing Initial Awareness: We Love Every Game focuses on the very top of the discovery funnel, aiming to give players quick "farmers' market" samples before sending them to Steam or human reviewers.
• Constrained Automation: To handle massive release volume, the startup uses tightly templated generative AI to create brief mechanical hooks while openly acknowledging AI's accuracy limitations.

The Business Model: Opt-In Sponsorships vs. Platform "Enshittification"​

Building discovery tools is noble, but servers and staff cost money. Because Totally Human Media is investor-backed, Lambe was transparent that the company must eventually turn a profit—and he even floated the long-term ambition of expanding the discovery model to books, music, movies, and television by 2027.

However, PC enthusiasts have watched countless well-meaning platforms degrade over time as invasive ad-tech and algorithmic manipulation take over. How does a discovery engine monetize without ruining the very recommendations users come for?

Lambe and Martindale proposed an explicit, opt-in interest sponsorship model:

• The Developer Pain Point: Right now, indie studios trying to market a niche PC game have to rely on blunt advertising instruments. As Martindale pointed out, Google Ads cannot easily target a specific micro-niche of strategy players, leaving studios to dump limited budgets into an "invisible space" and pray for traction.
• The Proposed Solution: Instead of browser fingerprinting, invasive tracking, or algorithmic guesswork, We Love Every Game envisions letting users explicitly declare hyper-specific tastes—for example, "gladiatorial management RPGs." If a developer launches a game that matches that exact description, they could sponsor a clearly visible placement in that specific feed to create a concentrated "thunderclap moment" at launch.

Critical Analysis: The Skeptic's View of Third-Party Discovery​

While Totally Human Media’s vision is compelling, it is worth stepping back to examine the broader industry debate. Not everyone agrees that Steam’s discovery ecosystem is "broken," or that a third-party website can fix it.

First, when Lambe’s critiques of Steam’s discovery landscape gained traction across developer and PC gaming forums like Reddit’s r/gamedev and r/pcgaming in late 2025, community reactions were sharply divided. While many indie developers echoed his frustration—noting that you can build a polished game and still struggle unless it has built-in viral hooks —skeptical players and developers pushed back. Some argued that Valve’s algorithm actually works remarkably well at surfacing games that demonstrate strong early engagement, and that expecting a storefront to guarantee an audience in a market flooded with over 50 new titles a day shifts the burden of marketing away from studios. Others pointed out the inherent conflict of interest when a founder critiques Steam’s discovery tools while promoting his own discovery startup.

Second, destination friction is a massive hurdle for any external discovery tool. Steam’s built-in Discovery Queue, Interactive Recommender, and Next Fest hubs have one unbeatable advantage: they live inside the client that millions of Windows and Steam Deck users already have open every day. Convincing PC gamers to regularly visit an external website or subscribe to another newsletter requires sustained, undeniable curation quality. And while explicit, non-invasive sponsored placements sound harmonious in theory, any platform that accepts developer money for visibility must maintain ironclad labeling so paid promotions never blur into organic "Hidden Gem" editorial picks.

Practical Takeaways: How PC Gamers and Indie Devs Can Beat the Flood Today​

Whether We Love Every Game becomes a permanent staple of your PC gaming routine or remains an intriguing experiment, you don't have to wait to improve how you find—or launch—games on Windows.

For PC Gamers Looking for Hidden Gems:​

1. Use Multi-Tag Filtering: Whether you use We Love Every Game’s category hubs, SteamDB’s instant search, or Steam’s own advanced search page, stop browsing by single broad tags like "RPG" or "Action." Combine 3 to 4 specific mechanical tags (e.g., Colony Sim + Automation + Co-op) to immediately cut through 95% of the storefront noise.
2. Look at Review Ratios, Not Just Volume: Mainstream hits accumulate tens of thousands of reviews, dominating storefront carousels. Filtering for games with 80%+ positive ratings but only 30 to 500 reviews is one of the most reliable ways to uncover high-quality indie releases that lacked a marketing budget.
3. Separate Sale Browsing from Discovery: Seasonal Steam sales are notorious for pushing the same top-selling blockbusters to the front page. Dedicated sale digest guides or curated weekly lists can save hours of aimless scrolling.

For Indie Developers:​

1. Treat Tags as Mechanical Connectors: Don't just tag your game's broad genre; tag the specific player motivations and loops (base-building, time-loop, inventory management) that connect your title to adjacent hits.
2. Focus on the Top of the Funnel Before Launch: Storefront algorithms reward momentum rather than creating it from scratch. Building initial awareness through playable Next Fest demos, micro-trailers, and targeted niche communities remains essential before your launch day arrives.

What do you think—is Steam’s discovery queue still working for your gaming habits, or have the 20,000+ annual releases pushed you toward external curation tools and newsletters? Let us know how you hunt for your next favorite PC game in the WindowsForum community discussions!