WayForward

Profile updated May 2026

WayForward developed Shantae: Half-Genie Hero Ultimate Edition and Mighty Switch Force! Collection, with 2 titles listed and 1,338 total Steam reviews. The studio's dominant genre is Action.

WayForward is an indie game studio. indielist tracks 6 titles by WayForward, together holding 8,430 Steam reviews. Its most-reviewed game is Shantae: Half-Genie Hero, which holds 1,972 Steam reviews (2016). Across its catalog the studio has worked with 2 publishers, including WayForward and Midnight City. indielist tracks releases from WayForward starting in 2014. That averages about 1,405 Steam reviews per title. This profile sits inside indielist's relationship graph of studios, publishers, and games, so players can find more titles from the same team, developers can compare portfolios and team sizes against peers, and investors can trace which publishers and genres the studio works across. Where Steam review data is available, indielist also publishes a transparent, white-box sales estimate for each of the studio's games, showing the full Boxleiter factor breakdown rather than a single black-box number, so the commercial picture behind WayForward can be audited rather than taken on trust.

Across its 6 tracked titles released between 2014 and 2019, WayForward has accumulated 8,430 Steam reviews, an average of about 1,400 per game, and its most-reviewed entries are Shantae: Half-Genie Hero, Double Dragon: Neon, Shantae and the Pirate's Curse, Shantae: Risky's Revenge - Director's Cut. Review counts are the most reliable public proxy indielist has for an indie studio's reach, since raw sales are almost never disclosed, so this spread is a fair snapshot of how widely the studio's work has landed. Developers can read these figures as a benchmark: a studio of this output and review volume is a useful reference point when projecting where a comparable project might end up, and indielist shows the white-box sales estimate behind every one of those titles, so the comparison rests on visible Boxleiter math, factor by factor, rather than on a reputation or a single black-box number.

On the business side, WayForward has shipped with 2 publishers (WayForward and Midnight City), and indielist maps each of those relationships as an edge in its studio-to-publisher-to-game graph. That matters to two audiences in particular: an investor can trace which labels have backed this studio and how that roster has changed over time, while a developer can see which publishers are already comfortable signing work in the studio's genres before deciding where to send a pitch. This is the kind of sourcing intelligence that is slow and tedious to reconstruct from Steam store pages alone, because the storefront never exposes who introduced whom. Each linked publisher page in turn lists its full roster, deal tier, and current submission status, so the network around WayForward can be walked outward in either direction rather than read as a flat, disconnected list.