Led by *The Boundless Immortal Realm*! How Strong Is April’s INDIE Live Expo?

What impressed me most wasn’t the name of any particular new title, but that this time INDIE Waves has expanded directly to around 160 games. For an indie game showcase, that kind of scale is rare—it’s like dumping an entire row of your Steam wishlist right in front of you all at once, with a density somewhere close to “a pixel-art Nintendo Direct meets an itch.io carnival.” The INDIE Live Expo Executive Committee has already confirmed that “INDIE Live Expo 2026.4.25” will be livestreamed on April 25, 2026 at 17:00 Beijing time, and it will once again be broadcast globally in four languages simultaneously: Japanese, Chinese, English, and Korean.

Over the years, this show has increasingly come to feel like a fixed annual festival for the indie game scene. The official numbers are solid: total views have already exceeded 100 million, and the number of games introduced on the program has surpassed 3,100. On that note, submissions for this year’s open call topped 1,000 for the first time, with about 1,100 entries received. Roughly 200 games will ultimately be featured in the main broadcast, including selected highlights chosen from those submissions. That’s a deep enough pool to noticeably raise the odds of stumbling across a dark horse.

Among the specific segments, the ones I’m watching most closely are still the expanded INDIE Waves and the extended INDIE Spotlight. The former appears this time as “INDIE Waves powered by Cygames”—Cygames has supported the show since its early days, and this time it’s essentially making the signature section even bigger. The latter will feature global first reveals and new updates on high-profile titles, and usually packs a higher information density, making it perfect for people camping the stream for that “add it to the wishlist today” kind of surprise. For someone like me, whose Steam library is stuffed with pixel-art indies, the most charming thing about this kind of show has never been the big-budget headliners, but those moments when you suddenly spot a small game with a strange name, imperfect presentation, and brilliantly clever mechanics.

A few key titles have already been highlighted for this Spotlight, including China’s Wufan Xianyu, Sukeban Games’ new title .45 PARABELLUM BLOODHOUND, and moorestech, a game Japanese solo developer spent five years creating. If you remember Sukeban Games, you’ll immediately think of the strong identity of VA-11 Hall-A, so expectations for its new work naturally run high. What’s interesting is that the lineup also includes titles like Chuunibyou Consultation Room: The Second Reality Translator, Dreamy Magical Princess, SHIKA-Q, Well Dweller, Pain Pain Go Away!, and Dizzy Radio Syndrome—names that already carry that unmistakable indie-game flavor of refusing to play by the rules.

Trend-wise, INDIE Live Expo now feels more like a global traffic hub for indie games than just a simple showcase lineup. It simultaneously covers platforms including bilibili, YouTube Live, Twitter Live, Twitch, niconico Live, Steam, and TikTok. The Chinese-language broadcast will be handled by 雷电-游戏电波 and 独立游戏蜥蜴君, and the Bilibili livestream room number is 22229644. But unfortunately, the bigger indie showcases get, the easier it becomes for truly creative small games to be washed out by the flood of information. So viewers really shouldn’t focus only on the big names—instead, it’s worth paying more attention to those unfamiliar faces in Waves that flash by for only a few dozen seconds.

If you already enjoy watching indie game showcases, I’d strongly recommend tuning in live for this one, especially if you’re the kind of player whose wishlist is perpetually hungry. Compared with waiting for media roundups afterward, the biggest joy of watching live is that you can catch, in real time, that moment of “Wait, this thing can do that?!” It feels a bit like the first time you saw a Celeste trailer, or that jolt you got when you unexpectedly stumbled across Undertale. As for creators and streamers, the organizers are also recruiting support streams with no language or platform restrictions, and they’ve launched the free email magazine INDIE Live Expo Letter as well. For developers and publishers, this ecosystem is no longer just a display window—it’s gradually becoming a lasting independent platform for making their voices heard.