simulators

Micro-niches are one of the most fascinating phenomena on Steam: coming from no one knows where, putting developers thousands of kilometers apart from each other, thanks to them a handful of games come together that share thematic, aesthetic or mechanical features (what is known in the indie scene as multiple discovery). Now, surfing the wave of the nostalgia millennialseveral games from a new micro-niche coincide: management and work with retro overtones. Long live plastic. Long live the video store. In March 2026, two games about 90s video stores were released on Steam by two development teams who didn’t know each other within six days of each other. Neither knew of the other’s work, but both succeeded: they climbed the Valve store’s sales rankings and accumulated thousands of positive reviews. And the whole phenomenon says a lot about the cultural moment we are in. Retro Rewind. With the subtitle ‘Video Store Simulator‘, this game arrived on Steam on March 17, 2026. It was developed by Blood Pact Studios, a two-person team in Canada, and sold more than 100,000 copies in its first four days. The reviews, in the “Overwhelmingly Positive” category. Its mechanics are deliberately simple: you open a video store in the early 90s, order tapes from a catalogue, fill shelves by genre, charge fines for late returns and serve the customer who wants ‘Terminator 2’, of which there are no copies left. There’s even an adult section hidden in a corner and a pirate tape dealer that appears twice a week in an alley. Rewind 99. Six days before,’Rewind 99‘ entered Early Access with an almost identical premise but a different tone. Developed by Gunmetal Games, the game places the player in charge of the last video store in the city in 1999, fighting against the expansion of a streaming service called RentNet. ‘Retro Rewind’ is committed to pure single-player management, but ‘Rewind 99’ it is more complex: RPG-like progression, open world, side missions and online cooperative mode. Reviews within the framework of “Very Positive” and complete exit from Early Access in 2028. ReStory: Chill Electronics Repairs. Let’s go to another somewhat more cozy aspect of nostalgia millennial. ‘ReStory: Chill Electronics Repairs‘, developed by Mandragora and published by tinyBuild, is not about renting retro technology, but about manipulating it. Disassembling, cleaning, soldering and rebuilding cartridges in a Tokyo repair shop in the early 2000s is the central task of the game, which also not short of iconic ambitionas it includes officially licensed Atari consoles such as the 2600 and Jaguar, as well as mobile phones, cameras, digital pets and music players. The player’s work also affects the customers and the destiny of the store. There is a demo in limited playtest on Steam and the launch is scheduled for this year. Stores for millennials. This coincidence is explained by two phenomena that collide and whose fruits sprout here: on the one hand, the store simulator subgenre, which has been established on Steam for years thanks to titles such as ‘Supermarket Simulator’ or ‘Gas Station Simulator’, with thematic inventory management and customer service (with countless variants, from dating games to visual novels) as central mechanics. And on the other hand, nostalgia millennial which is now beginning to miss the latest developments in physical formats, such as cartridges, VHS or DVDs. Result of the pairing: the most endearingly turbocapitalist indie games of the moment. In Xataka | The internet has decided that 2016 was great and worth remembering. But there’s a problem: it wasn’t at all.