Indie Game Publishing Latin America – How Indie Hero Is Building a Global Indie Game Ecosystem From Brazil:
Juliana Brito runs more businesses than most people have projects on their backlog. As co-founder of Indie Hero, Game Jam Plus, Plugin Plus, and a growing indie publishing label, she has spent five years building one of the most active and internationally connected game development ecosystems in Latin America, and increasingly beyond it.
Juliana joined Jay Powell, Founder of IndieGameBusiness®, for a fireside chat covering how all of these businesses started, why the original business model failed, what she has learned about publishing and marketing games with almost no budget, and the practical approaches that have actually moved the needle for the small studios she works with.
How Game Jam Plus Started and Why the Original Idea Fell Apart:
Game Jam Plus is celebrating its tenth edition this year. The origin story is not what most people expect. It did not start as a game jam. It started as a crowd testing platform where game developers could submit games, other developers could playtest them, and everyone would benefit from cheaper, higher-quality feedback before launch.
The problem was getting enough people onto the platform to make the testing valuable. The solution was to run a game jam that would bring developers in, generate leads, and funnel those participants into the testing platform. The game jam worked. The crowd testing platform never did.
After five years and genuine effort, the testing platform was dropped entirely. The game jam, which had started as a marketing tool, had become the actual business, growing from a small Brazil-only event to a global competition running across fifty countries with thousands of participants each year.
Julia’s reflection on that arc is worth sitting with: the original ideas were not good. What she and co-founder Ian turned out to be skilled at was recognizing the opportunities that appeared as things evolved and saying yes to them even when they had no prior experience in that area. An event manager hired them to bring studios to a conference. They did not do that yet, but they figured it out. A government agency wanted an accelerator program. They built one. The business that exists today grew out of saying yes to those opportunities, not from executing a plan they had written at the start.
Why Indie Hero Exists and What It Actually Does:
Indie Hero was created specifically to be a commercial engine for the ecosystem that Game Jam Plus was building. The original model was intermediation: connecting publishers and investors with studios and taking a cut of the deals that resulted.
In five years, they closed five deals. The revenue from those deals was negligible. The model did not work.
What they learned from watching those deals fail was that the problem was not access to publishers. The problem was that the studios were not ready. Pitch decks were poorly constructed. Business models did not hold up to basic scrutiny. A studio asking for three hundred thousand dollars to make a game whose best-case comparable sold three hundred thousand dollars total had not done the math. Indie Hero started running classes to fix those fundamentals, teaching pitch deck construction, financial modeling, and the basics of how publishing deals actually work.
From there, the business continued to evolve:
- Government agencies hired Indie Hero to run accelerator and incubation programs for game studios
- Event managers hired them to organize B2B events and bring qualified studios to conferences
- The Brazilian Game Festival grew to sixty-five thousand attendees
- B2B events were built with MeetToMatch infrastructure to manage the matchmaking between studios, publishers, and investors
- A small publishing label was added two years ago when Julia realized the knowledge developers needed was available but they were not willing to use it themselves
The Publishing Label and What It Has Taught Her About Self-Publishing:
The publishing operation started from a specific frustration. Julia had spent years pointing developers toward publicly available resources, the Steam documentation, how-to-market-a-game websites, the IndieGameBusiness® community, and watching most of them ignore those resources and insist on finding a traditional publisher instead.
When a developer told her he would give her a share of his game if she did the publishing work herself, she took the deal. The label launched. Two years in, it has published approximately twenty games with ten more lined up to launch in the near term. Games have sold thirty to forty thousand copies. The operation is close to breaking even. None of the games are large budget productions. Most cost a thousand to two thousand dollars to make and are designed to generate a positive return on that investment rather than to be breakout hits.
The studios she signs tend to be games that would never find a traditional publisher, not because the games are bad, but because traditional publishers are not structured to work with small, niche titles that will sell a modest but real number of copies. A game that sells thirty thousand copies to a dedicated niche audience is a success for a micro-publisher. It does not fit the acquisition criteria of a publisher looking for titles with million-copy potential.
One standout example: a studio from Italy received a grant of approximately half a million euros from the government to build a beautiful open-world adventure game. Two years of searching for a publisher produced nothing. The game was too close to The Legend of Zelda’s territory for any publisher to take a chance on it commercially. Indie Hero signed it, brought in PR partners in Japan and Europe, hired influencers in Asia, and is handling Latin distribution directly. The budget for the entire marketing operation is small. It still made more sense for the Italian studio than two more years of rejection.
What the Steam Documentation Actually Contains and Why Developers Do Not Read It:
One of the most consistent themes in Julia’s work with developers across all of her programs is the gap between what developers know about the platforms they are launching on and what is publicly available in those platforms’ own documentation.
She asks developers the same question in every talk she gives: how many of you have read the Steam documentation? In a room of fifty developers, she typically sees one hand.
Steam drives approximately fifty percent of sales for most indie games. The documentation covers how the algorithm works, how the platform surfaces games to new players, how tags and keywords affect discoverability, and how the recommendation system responds to different player behaviors. That information is updated every six months and is publicly accessible. Most developers launching on Steam have not read it.
Julia’s characterization of what she has learned from actually reading and applying that documentation:
- Understanding the Steam algorithm is more valuable than spending money on influencers. Influencer campaigns she has run have accounted for as little as five percent of total sales on some titles.
- Getting tags, keywords, and localization right consistently outperforms paid promotion in terms of return on effort.
- Localization is not just translation. The way a game is sold in Germany requires different framing than the way it is sold in the United States. In Brazil, games without meme content underperform with local audiences.
- Steam behaves differently from social platforms like Instagram. Rather than daily algorithmic distribution, Steam functions on peaks. When a large number of players engage with a game at the same time, the algorithm amplifies that activity disproportionately. Campaigns that concentrate engagement in short windows rather than spreading it across weeks produce better results.
A-B Testing Thumbnails Before Steam Next Fest:
One of the most concrete and immediately actionable things Julia shared was her approach to Steam thumbnails, which she described as something almost no developer in the indie space was doing before campaigns, despite it being standard practice in every other content industry.
Before submitting a game to Steam Next Fest, Julia runs A-B tests on five different thumbnail variations, putting each through paid ads to measure which version converts better at a click level before committing to a campaign. The difference between the best and worst-performing thumbnail often appears small, but the compounding effect inside Steam’s algorithm means a thumbnail that converts at a slightly higher rate produces meaningfully better outcomes when the Next Fest traffic peaks hit.
She referenced The Diary of the CEO podcast, which tests between one hundred and two hundred thumbnail variations before publishing a single episode. That level of testing feels extreme in the games context, but her point is that even testing five variants is being held up as unusual in the indie game space. The bar is very low. Basic testing discipline alone puts a developer ahead of most competitors.
The variables worth testing according to her experience:
- Warm versus cold color palettes and which performs better for the specific genre
- Two-dimensional versus three-dimensional art representation of the game in the thumbnail
- Character-forward versus environment-forward thumbnail composition
- Whether text overlays on thumbnails help or hurt conversion for the target audience
How to Get Reviews in the First Twenty Four Hours:
Launch-day reviews are one of the clearest signals Steam uses to determine how aggressively to surface a new game. Julia’s approach to generating early reviews is not a paid strategy. It is a community strategy built over the months before launch.
Her logic is direct: if a developer has built a genuine community around their game, even a small one of a hundred engaged Discord members, those people already care about the game succeeding. They are not passive followers. They are active participants who have been watching development, providing feedback, and identifying with the project. If those people are asked directly and personally to leave a review on launch day, most of them will do it.
A developer who coordinates that request thoughtfully, aligning timing across their community so reviews land in a concentrated window, can generate a meaningful number of reviews in the first day through community alone. That initial burst of concentrated review activity sends a strong signal to the Steam algorithm at exactly the moment when the game is most visible.
The underlying requirement is that the community needs to exist before launch. Building community is not a launch-week activity. It is a development-period activity. Developers who arrive at launch without a community have no base to activate and are dependent on organic discovery alone, which puts them at a structural disadvantage in the early hours when Steam’s algorithm is forming its initial read on the game’s momentum.
Whether GTA VI Is a Threat to Indie Publishers:
Jay asked directly whether Grand Theft Auto VI’s release represents a threat to the indie games Julia publishes. Her answer was grounded in how she actually thinks about market competition.
She is not trying to sell a million copies of anything. The games her label works with are targeting thirty to fifty thousand copies sold to audiences who are specifically interested in those genres. A player who is deeply attached to horror games or a specific niche genre is not going to stop buying games in that niche because Grand Theft Auto VI released. The audience overlap is minimal.
Her concern is not with titles directly competing in the same genre. Her concern is with large general-audience games that might pull casual players away from browsing new titles during a specific window. For a niche indie game with a dedicated audience, the release calendar impact of a cultural phenomenon like GTA VI is real but limited.
Want more insights like this?:
Join us for our IndieGameBusiness Sessions, taking place on September 30th from 9am – 5pm Eastern or hop into the IndieGameBusiness® Discord to connect with Juliana and other industry pros.
The IndieGameBusiness® podcast drops new episodes regularly, covering the business side of making and selling games. Subscribe to the newsletter to get episodes, Discord events, and industry news straight to your inbox. Subscribe now
