Ask Lemmy

tries to think of games that I've enjoyed

• Up until Rule the Waves 3, Naval Warfare Simulations didn't want to release in someone else's online stores. For RtW3, they did, however, release on Steam and on Matrix Games (a publisher and online store that specializes in wargames). I wouldn't recommend buying earlier games in the series in 2025, as RtW3 is really a superset of them, but it's still the case that the earlier games in the series would meet your criteria.

• Starsector

• Many major platforms run into issues with adult video games and people or jurisdictions that take issue with them. While Steam's been a little more permissive in the past several years (though some Steam releases have also seen some degree of censorship), I'd say that adult video games probably are a major category that'd be off the major online stores. What's "best" here depends a great deal on the individual player, but I'll just mention it up front.

• Some open-source games that aren't interested in making money. A few have done Steam releases to let players throw some money to the devs, but there are a bunch that haven't. Roguelikes

one of the few genres of game where the open-source world is really competitive with the closed-source world

are prominent here. I'm not going to try to recommend a specific one; probably the ones that I've played the most of that aren't on Steam are Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup and the older Tales of Maj'Eyal 2 (ToME 3 is commercial and on Steam), and even older Zangband. Browsing a Linux distro's package repository or reading a list of best open-source games will turn up a bunch.

• I haven't played them, but if you're a fan of a series, some unlicensed fan games which would probably run into trademark or copyright issues if put on a store. The Metroid series has seen a number of these, for example.

• Some games for old systems that can be emulated but have never seen a Steam or otherwise re-release. Or have seen re-releases on platforms that are all dead; it looks like 1942, a popular shmup arcade game, has only been re-released on platforms that are now dead.

• Some games that have been fan-translated but never seen an official translation. The sequel to Secret of Mana for the Super Nintendo, Seiken Densetsu 3, had a fan translation, but would never see an official English translation. It's not likely that Square Enix would go re-localize it in 2025 or try to figure out how to arrange to do a release of the fan translation.