The Find Games Like directory I'm building at findindiegame.com is built entirely on Steam data: a nightly ETL pulls from the Steam API, generates content with Claude Haiku, and writes rows into Turso libSQL. Every game in the system has an integer appid , a Steam store URL, and optionally Humble/Fanatical affiliate links.

That pipeline covers thousands of games. But my own release, Shin KoiKoi — a free Hanafuda Koi-Koi implementation I shipped last week — lives on itch.io and has no Steam listing yet. Leaving it out of the directory felt like a solvable gap.

The naive fix would be adding an itch.io bypass flag into the ETL. I didn't want to do that. The ETL runs on a 6-hour cron, touches five tables, and assumes integer appid throughout. Injecting special-case logic for itch entries would mean auditing every query for null handling.…