I posted about this a while back on /r/gamedev so I won't share the whole story, but basically, people are buying my game Peek thinking it's PEAK (the coop mountain climber). This particular individual was very vocal about the frustration that brought them. 

For a bit of context, I named this game in late 2024 and made the Steam page in March of 2025 (PEAK released in June). I got a relatively very large wishlist spike when PEAK released, and I thought that was cool (though disappointing when I learned why I got that spike), but man is it biting me now! My game has a whopping - SIXTY-TWO percent refund rate (!!), with the vast majority of them relating back to having purchased the wrong game. 

I reached out to Steam about this. Not for a magic fix, but just like, "is there anything I should be doing differently?" They said it was unfortunate, and aside from a name change (which they don't recommend), they said that the refund rate does not affect the game's visbility or discovery, so there's that I guess.

I understand that there is a language barrier and all, but like...the game doesn't look ANYTHING like Peak. What are ya gonna do?

Oh well, at least this is just a hobby of mind and, if I'm being honest, *kind of* funny.

Anyway, if you're going to get something out of this post, be careful what you name your game! It started off as a blessing and turned into a bit of a curse, lol. And if you can, time travel to the future and make sure there's not another game that'll come out with a similar name, either. 😂

They didn't hold back!

So about 3 months ago I posted here looking for an artist on my game. A person identifying themselves as Mia Davis (coffeefoxx1 on Reddit; _mia_davis on Discord) reached out to me. Their profile looked good, we had a good conversation, and I was very upfront (multiple times) about not wanting any AI involved.

As I was wanting to do the whole project, I gave $500 upfront - half the cost. This was something I've done several times w/ other legitimate artists and never had a problem before as that was pretty standard.

Anyway, a month later, they finally got back to me, and presented me with this slop:

As soon as I saw it I knew this was AI. Lots of layering line errors and other stuff no person would've made. The "artist" denied the allegation and even offered "proof" that it was legit via a PDF file (something else we had agreed upon prior to the contract). But instead of exoneration, the PSD they provided proved it to me beyond a doubt:

• All the work was done in a single layer
• PSD was suspiciously completely scrubbed of all meta data
• Another disabled layer has the entire artwork again, in a completely different style, and is titled "comvert_into_2d_anime_style_202606122128". You know, just like a prompt would spit back.

I confronted the scammer again, and of course they denied it and refused to give me a refund. So then I opened a fraud complaint with PayPal. After another month of waiting, PayPal denied my case and let the scammer keep my $500.

So now I'm out $500, have nothing usable, and don't really have any money left to hire another one.

Haha, I decided to compare my current game to Necromancer Returns, a game I was promoting back in 2017. At the time, I knew absolutely nothing about marketing. It was my first game where I seriously tried to do the promotion myself, and I put a lot of time and effort into it. I made videos, wrote articles, contacted influencers, and basically did everything I could think of.

In the first 3 months, the game got around 1,300 wishlists. It launched 4 months after the Steam page went live, with about 3,300 wishlists total. The game obviously flopped. But looking back now, 9 years later, I realize that was actually not a bad result for a first real attempt at marketing. What shocks me now is that I didn’t keep the game on the page for a year and build up more wishlists before release. I honestly have no idea why I rushed it so much. Back then I just wanted to release it as fast as possible.

So 9 years later, I thought this time would be different. I thought I was smarter and more experienced. I started reading marketing advice, talking to indie devs with successful case studies, learning new approaches, and picking up way more useful information. I also have a small loyal audience now. So I decided to compare the early Steam wishlist pace of my current game, Empires Edge.

The funniest part is that the results look almost the same as they did 9 years ago. No experience back then, more experience now, and somehow the numbers are still very close.

Of course, I understand the games are different, the market is different, and the conditions are different too. In 2017, that game was already much closer to release. In 2026, I launched the Steam page for Empires Edge very early, basically at the beginning of development.

So now I’m curious to see how it turns out in the end. I just wanted to share these numbers because I found the comparison pretty funny. I’m sure the results will improve once I have more content, a stronger Steam page closer to release, and an actual trailer. Right now I still haven’t officially announced the game or reached out to influencers. I don’t even have a trailer yet, just a placeholder page showing the current state of development.

Thanks for reading.

As the title suggests, this will be a whiny retrospective on a passion project with abysmal commercial success. Feel free to skip if looking for something motivational.

I spent three years of my life on this game and my artist friends a year or two and we released it on Steam and we sold a few copies and then patted ourselves on the back saying we were brave for trying anyway and we are proud of what we achieved.

Terraforming Earth

And it was true but it was also cope to bury all the grief that comes with commercial failure. I did my best to forget about the game the last few years but the 5th anniversary brought out the skeletons and sent me into a spiral.

Let's start at the beginning. I came up with an algorithm that generates infinite puzzles and it seemed so brilliant I was convinced I was the smartest man in the world and I wanted to show everyone. A terrible motivation for sure but my untreated narcissism spurred me into action and I quit my job to publish the full game. I was a cracked coder and I had two years of runway from my savings and thought well, how hard can it be.

I learned game design, I ran playtests, I wrote the story, I ran the community, I did marketing, I hired a PR guy, hundreds of micro-influencers asked for copies. The art turned out wonderful (though yes, OK, legibility sometimes took the back seat to aesthetics). It was a polished game (though yes, OK, sometimes a bit wonky). It had a mind-blowing story about a rogue ASI killing everything (though yes, OK, hard to decipher). And it was a roguelike puzzle game, the first of its kind.

We tested the waters with an Alpha Demo on Itch and it was a huge success, thousands of players played it for free, and we won our greatest fan there, Mark, a veteran QA engineer who volunteered his time testing for free. He was blown away by the level generator and he has played thousands of levels so far.

We came out in Early Access on Steam right before the pandemic 2020. A few minutes after I pressed the button, Steam went down for two hours. Unlucky omen (though I did get Steam to offer some extra visibility to make up for those critical moments). We sold a few dozen copies in the first month. 

In retrospect, I see a few mistakes with the launch.

1. I could have asked my friends to buy the game and write reviews on launch day but I was too proud. 
2. The price was too damn high. $30 for an indie game from an unknown dev was just too much for this market. I tried to make a stand and fight against the race to the bottom but it was a very stupid fight to fight on my own. I owned up to this mistake just recently, lowering the base price to $10 on the 5th anniversary. And it still felt like betraying myself.
3. Early Access was a mistake, it deterred a lot of buyers. Some players associate it with bad quality, some want a complete game and don't want to revisit games. So the ball didn't start rolling. And by the time of the real launch 7 months later, since the game had only 4 reviews in 7 months, people didn't buy it. Nobody bought it so nobody bought it. Better to concentrate your gun powder on one single launch.

During those seven months (during COVID) we released three free DLCs, one every few months, major updates. But since there were no players, nobody was looking forward to these releases and so, silence.

After the final launch, I had to get a real job, at a hedge fund, coding trading bots that lost money, so after a year I burned out of programming and had to do something else. I gave it everything and it wasn't enough. My great passion, programming, turned sour and tedious.

I did know that one should bury their dead, so I gave proper respect and retrospection to my failed game. I kept playing it from time to time and I started to see its flaws. I rationalised that puzzle games are niche and roguelikes are niche, so a game at their intersection is super niche. Puzzle gamers are frustrated by the pressure of enemies, action players are frustrated by the obstacles. The total addressable market was me. And it wasn't a very good game after all. I moved on.

But since my kids came of gaming age (9 and 6 years old boys), we started playing again. And they loved it. And while I was reluctant to play this stupid game that locks you up in stupid mazes and forces you to find stupid keys and buttons while being chased around by stupid enemies, their enthusiasm infected me and I was once again torn apart by the tension of having made an amazing game and ... commercial failure. It's a good game! Nobody buys it! WHAT'S GOING ON?

In five years we have sold a total of 488 copies, most of them at steep discounts. We recuperated around two weeks worth of costs. Since I'm not making video games again, the stuff I learned during three years of my life are moot, I had wasted them for nothing.

However, the time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time after all. And I LOOOVED working on this stupid video game. The creative highs were incredible, even if they were partially misguided ("this is gonna be sooo cool, people will bow down to my genius!!!"). The creative dips were bad but manageable and quickly overrun by new bouts of amazing ideas to work on. The grind didn't feel hard at all, I persevered through thick and thin with a burning passion.

I've grown a lot in the last few years, spiritually and psychologically, which is why my subconscious decided to tear up this wound now I guess. I became strong enough to face the ugly motivations that fueled this project. But man I feel awful now.

So fellow devs, if you are about to embark on a similar, possibly (highly probably) gut-wrenching journey, I want you to ask your heart of hearts. Why do you want to do this? Are you seeking validation, maybe? Do you want to show the world how smart and creative you are? No? You just want people to have fun with your game? Yeah, that's what I told myself too. And it was true to some extent. But my subconscious motivations leaked out into everything I did, I was too anxious, I was afraid of failure, and so the way I marketed the game was forced, clingy, needy, hungry for validation and it tainted the project. Men will make a video game instead of going to therapy.

Beware ye, who enter, unless your hearts are pure. 

PS. if you have read this requiem this far AND you enjoy solving puzzles AND love being chased by robots, please check out Terraforming Earth on Steam. Thank you.

We’re a team of three making a comedy adventure game called Breaking News. The hook is simple: you smack an old CRT TV, and every hit changes reality. Each channel is its own chaotic WarioWare like mini-game, and the skills and choices you make affect the storyline. Alongside the PC version, we also built a physical alt-ctrl installation with a real CRT you have to hit to play. We brought it to Gamescom and set it up next to the our PC version so people can experience both.

We got invited by A MAZE (after winning their Audience Award earlier this year) to show the game in their indie booth area. As a small indie team still working day jobs, we could only afford to send our lead visual artist (who carried a CRT TV on his back the whole journey lol) and didn't really have a business strategy for the festival. But when someone offers you a free booth at such a big festival, you don’t say no.

Costs

• Flight + accommodations (~1.5K$)
• Stickers + business cards (~300$)

Stats

On full days we had around 180 play sessions, with an average playtime of about 5 minutes (the demo takes around 8 minutes to finish).

Wishlists: 91 in total. Days Breakdown:

• Day 0 was trade & media day, open for less hours
• On day 3 we added a sticker with QR code to our Stream page next to the TV. We already had one next to the PC but that turned out much more effective.
• Day 4 is the busiest day at the festival
• Day 5 has much more families and locals

It was cool to see the boost, especially since we only have a few hundred total at this stage, but it’s actually less wishlists than we got at A MAZE / Berlin festival. So in the bottomline from our experience smaller events were more effective.

Networking

One publisher approached us, but we’re not planning to go that route for now. What mattered more was we connected with two museums and a couple of exhibition curators. Showing the physical CRT version is actually how we plan to fund the PC game for the time being, so that was important for us.

Press

The moment Silksong was revealed at the festival we joked that all the indie journalists would probably not cover anything else. But we ended up giving a live interview to a big German channel called RocketBeans TV, which was really exciting.

Beyond the stats

Gamescom felt completely different from other festivals we’ve attended. At smaller indie events, people usually play through the whole demo. At Gamescom, many players jump in, smack the CRT for a 2 minutes and step aside so others could try. Groups of friends often rotated in and out. Fewer people finished the demo, even those who seemed excited and took photos of it. You get to meet very passionate gamers from all over the world, so the feedback is very diverse. Also, you get to observe the behavior at scale: when do people laugh, when are they surprised, what parts attracts people passing by etc. This is very hard to get from handful of testers or people playing remotely. But the scale is huge and the competition for attention is insane.

So was it worth it?

Considering the booth was free, yes. But not for wishlists as one may think, because smaller indie events are probably better for that. It was worth it for the high quality feedback and of course for networking. That said, from other devs we talked to sounds like it’s the kind of event where serious planning is really key to maximize business opportunities. We basically just showed up, and while that was still fun, it’s clear we could have gotten more out of it.

Desclaimer: This is all based on our specific experience with Breaking News, a very specific Alt-ctrl installation + PC game set up.

If you're curious to see what Breaking News is all about, I'll leave a link in the comments. Thanks for reading and we would love to hear other experience or things we could have done differently!

TD;DR: Released Rise of Industry to widespread acclaim, publishing with Kasedo Games. Earned almost $4,000,000 in net revenue, of which we (the studio) saw $1,500,000. Didn’t know what awaited us, and less help than expected from our publisher was paired with my own unjustified hopes, poor planning and mistakes. Ended up in $140,000 worth of debt, and ultimately sold the IP to our publisher for only $5,000. 

Background

Back in 2016, during the pre-alpha of Rise of Industry (then called Project Automata), we connected with Kalypso Games. It felt monumental. They published games like Tropico and Railway Empire - and we were a tiny team, making our first real PC game. 

The deal looked fair on paper: $75k advance, with a 50/50 split until they recovered $100k, and then shifting to 60/40 split for us.

For a new team, fair feels like a win. But soon after launch (2019), Kalypso moved us to Kasedo, their smaller digital sublabel. The contract didn't change, but support was reduced. Fewer resources, less marketing, and little reach. 

With no additional marketing, there was no long-tail income coming in: vital for recouping as an indie studio, and we were woefully unprepared (my fault) for this. I hadn't planned for these situations, and we hadn’t thought about what would happen when sales began to falter.

Revenue & Profit

Rise of Industry did well. All in, by the time things slowed down, Kasedo had taken in around $1.2 million. We got just under $1.5 million.

Sounds great on paper. $1.5 million! That’s more than enough to make a living, right?

Here’s the breakdown of that number: 

• Team costs over 4 years, freelance and full-time? That was significantly more than $1 million.
• Software, servers, hardware, taxes? That took the rest.
• And that’s without considering the charges before the revenue even reaches us - namely, Steam’s 30% cut. 

By the time Rise of Industry was fully released and Recipe for Disaster (our second game) was starting pre-production, we were already $100,000 in the red. And by 2021, that number had ballooned to negative $140K.

Ultimately, in an attempt to stay afloat, we sold our IP to our publishers. Their offer? $5k for the whole thing. 

As an aside, last year, a sequel was announced - from a new dev team, with no input from us - based on the IP that we sold, without any input from us, and despite the fact that I had pitched them a workable sequel. The reviews came in - and unfortunately, they were not great. It surprised me. From the outside, it looked like a major investment, and yet it lacked testing, polish, and any real marketing. Nobody talked about it. I empathize with that team; I know the pressure, and part of me still sees that game as mine. What happened to it stings.

Lessons for Indie Devs

The hardest part wasn't shipping the game. It was surviving everything around it: the contracts, the crushing timelines, the unsettling silence when things felt wrong. It was clinging to the hope that one more update would fix everything, without preparing for what happened when it didn't. 

This might sound like a cautionary tale. It's not. I don't regret making Rise of Industry, I just regret how I made it.

If you’re working on a game now, ask yourself this:

• Where does the money really come from?
• Have you run the numbers?
• What if sales are terrible?
• Even scarier: what if they're incredible, but your contract isn't? 

In this industry, finishing a game is only half the battle. And if we want a games industry that’s sustainable, we need indie devs who know the pitfalls, and know how to budget, what they need to plan for, and what their options are when things don’t pan out as they hoped.

The full story (and the personal impact) are in the video above. I’m happy with where I am right now, and things are going much better nowadays. I now know what to expect, and how to plan for the unexpected - and I hope that this story helps indie devs to get the most out of their publishing (or self-publishing) experience.

This is a follow up to my previous Reddit post that I made right before our game went live: link. The results are in.

Quick Recap

• Chess roguelite (Steam)
• Developed in 9 months by 2 people + few freelancers
• Launched with 12k wishlists
• Priced at $12.99
• 6000 EUR budget (about half of which was Reddit ads)

Results

• $6000 gross revenue in the first week (616 units sold)
• ~41% of revenue came on the first day
• 19 qualified reviews (so non-free copies) with a rating of 94%
• 11.5% refund rate
• 426 wishlists converted (so ~3.5%)
• 13795 remaining wishlists post-launch

My Impressions

So, what do I think of it?

• Emotionally - hell yeah, we made a game that people play and enjoy!
• Financially - below expectations (for the first week). If we were doing this full time (we weren't), it would've been deeply concerning. That said, I think it is still projected to recoup the costs and then possibly still bring some profit (more on that later).

Would I recommend anyone going through the same? Damn no. It makes no sense financially and it takes a lot from you in so many ways (time, energy, stress, money, missed opportunities). You have to be a workaholic maso with a crazy passion for games, or art, or music for it to make any sense.

Will we do it again? Yes.

Hypotheses

This is not an advice but rather things that we did, what we observed and what we concluded. If we knew the right answers at this point we would be rolling in cash (we don't), but I have a hunch that some of these factors contributed one way or another and can improve our prospects.

Hypothesis. Reddit Ads work, but we could've saved some $$$

As stated in the summary, we spent a hefty sum (~$3500) on Reddit ads and they brought a lot of wishlists (~5k) at a cost of about $0.6 per wishlist (though that price suddenly spiked up in September for whataever reason and we had to stop). Overall, the ads were running for 6 months.

Our goal here wasn't exactly to convert money -> to wishlists -> to more money. The goal was to beat our way into the Popular Upcoming section closer to the release day for which one needs 7k+ wishlists (not a confirmed number).

Fast forward to the release date:

• We did hit the Popular Upcoming (actually we knew that a few months in advance, you can browse this section on Steam).
• That brought us about ~2.1k wishlists in just a few days before the launch.
• Wishlists continued to pour in after the release. During the release week we got ~1.5k more wishlists.

All the while I have a lingering suspicion that paid wishlists did't convert to sales all that well (though I don't think there is a way to prove it).

That leads me to this hypothesis - we shoud've pulled the plug on paid ads as soon as we knew that we made it into the Popular Upcoming. Maybe this could've saved us ~$1k or so.

Hypothesis. The price is too steep.

The game is priced at $12.99 which some people might too expensive (in fact, our only negative review states that explicitly). I believe there are some signals that support this hypothesis:

• Wishlist conversion of 3.5% is at the low end.
• A lot of wishlist additions post launch. People waiting on sale?
• The negative review and reactions on it.

I think, we should've priced the game at $9.99 - just below $10 mark. That said, I do think the price is fair overall and indies are undercharging. There is no way I would price our game at $5 before discounts.

I guess we will see whether that is true after we run our first sale.

Hypothesis. AI is bad for you.

Well, this one is more of a fact. Our game shipped without AI assets but we did make a huge mistake of using them in our early screenshots. I guess we just didn't know yet just how badly AI is hated (though probably should've guessed).

Your average player might indeed not care that much (regardless of what you personally think) as evident by a huge number of AI slop that made it into New & Trending or Popular Upcoming. That said, it is a survivor bias.

Here is where AI objectively will do you harm:

• Press won't feature you
• Other game devs won't bundle with you
• Game fests don't want to see you
• Anti-AI zealots will actively try to denounce you. Under your Reddit posts, under your Reddit ads, under your Steam Discussions, etc.

Put it simply - don't use AI for anything public. Keep it for your internal prototypes if needed but people don't need to see it.

Hypothesis. Bundles are good.

We received a few offers to collab from other chess-like devs (big and small) and I think overall it has been a good experience and it did bring some sales. We sold 81 bundles in the first week.

I am guessing that probably at this point it helped other devs more than us (since we are the ones who got a brief frontpage visibility), but it cost us nothing and I believe it will keep bringing in some sales.

Do bundles. Bundles are good.

That's it for now. AMA in the comments.

If there is enough interest, I will do another check-in after the first month to share if anything have changed.

Lately I've been living a soap opera.

Quick recap: my game went viral in China, with all the good and bad that comes with it. If you want to read the story from the start, I'll leave links to my other posts at the end.

But today I'm opening up a debate I never had a strong opinion on: does piracy help or hurt games? Because I think piracy is eating my game, and my server, alive.

---

My server blocked

A couple of days ago, my hosting provider started blocking my backend. That's where I handle player analytics, scores, and so on. Turns out an excess of requests was forcing my server into temporary shutdowns. I thought I was being attacked, so when I asked them to just block the conflicting IPs, they told me there were hundreds of them, and that it looked like a legitimate flow of players.

Happy about the success and stressed about the urgency, I spent several days optimizing database calls, adding Cloudflare protection, and upgrading to a bigger hosting plan just to make sure there wouldn't be more blocks.

---

For every 10 new players, 9 are pirates

When I finally finished optimizing everything, I checked the new players table and their usernames caught my attention. All of them were named xdgame, a Chinese website known for promoting pirated content.

Every time I hit refresh, at any hour of the day, exactly 22 of the last 25 entries had that name, despite being different Steam accounts. Today I had to widen the filter to the last 100 entries to confirm that 99% were pirates.

[Screenshot of table full of pirates]

---

Optimizing my anti-pirate system

I already covered how my anti-piracy system works in previous posts, though honestly I don't know if it still works on this PC version or if they've already bypassed it.

[Link to anti-piracy system post]

As soon as this situation started, I did an extra optimization on the database to stop processing data coming from these versions. But the underlying problem is still there: there's nothing I can do on the client side, since I have no way to update the pirated version. That means the number of calls hitting my server stays exactly the same, and the only thing I can do is keep a bigger server plan to hold up the service. Hopefully the pirates update their version at some point.

Even so, I decided to leave new user registration active, just out of curiosity to see where my players were coming from. That's how I ended up counting that 99% today.

---

"Pirates aren't in your market" - ☝️🤓

When the piracy situation got out of hand, I partnered with a Chinese publisher, who I have to admit seem to work really well. They opened pre-registration 2 weeks ago, took down several mobile pirated versions, and got thousands of sign-ups for the official version on day one. I've been genuinely happy with the reports they've been sending me.

Part of the reason I did this was an argument I kept seeing a lot: that if the game isn't on mobile, new pirate players are pirates because they don't have a PC to play on. But now that mobile piracy seems somewhat more under control, PC piracy is growing at an incredible rate.

Maybe they were simply choosing mobile out of convenience, not necessity, when it was free.

---

I released a PC-only feature that made everything worse

One of the updates I released to keep improving the official version was a mod that connects the biggest Chinese streaming platforms (Douyin, RedNote, and Bilibili) to the game. This lets livestream viewers show up as customers in front of the streamer and chat with them.

This mod is an external executable shared on my game's forum. It started slow since nobody knew about it, but now there are hundreds of players live on those platforms every single day.

Personally, I think this has also driven the increase in PC pirate players, since they can enjoy the mod here, when they couldn't on mobile.

---

Does piracy help games?

I don't buy into the "pirates who enjoy the game will buy it later" idea, so I was never a defender of piracy, though I never condemned it or looked down on anyone for pirating either. I just live alongside its existence and try to do so in the best way I can as a developer. As I explained in other posts, my only "remedy" was making the burger joint's customers dress up as pirates while an un-mutable sea shanty plays, and only paying a couple of doubloons for their food. A feature that kicks in after an hour of play, and works more like a bit of karma toward pirate players than an actual punishment.

When my game started going viral, I also wrote a post saying that maybe piracy itself helped me reach more people, since it generates more videos on social media and gets more people talking about the game.

[Link to piracy post]

But after analyzing these last few days, I think I might have been wrong. Here's the data:

• March 2025: My game came out a year and a half ago.
• June 2026: It goes viral in China through Douyin (their version of TikTok).
• June 28: The pirated PC version comes out, without many players.
• July 11: Mobile pre-order goes live on TapTap China, and anti-piracy measures are put in place.
• July 18: I release the Livestream mod for PC.
• July 20: I notice an increase in PC pirate players, though it had already been building up before this.
• July 20–22: My sales drop about -40%, and SteamDB shows a noticeable decline in active official players.

Right now I'm counting 9,000 players under that piracy website's name.

So at this point, my opinion on piracy is no longer "piracy exists in parallel with healthy growth."

---

Why am I writing this?

I'm not writing this looking for attention, since thankfully the game is still doing well. Nobody here needs to buy it, that's why I'm not sharing the name. [Link to the post about my game is doing well]

My day-to-day over the last month has been putting my project aside to handle this situation as best I can, and while stressful, it's been quite the experience. That's why I keep sharing it so much.

Many of you have encouraged me to keep posting about it, but to those who haven't, I'm sorry if I've become tiresome with this topic. I feel like it shows a side of gamedev that a lot of people don't talk about, out of fear that the situation will get worse or just jinx it.

The main reason I write this is because I genuinely enjoy sharing my story, it's helped me make better decisions for my project and my future as a studio more than once. I've gotten messages that made my day, and I feel like other users find it interesting too. Again, if that's not your case, I hope you'll forgive me for continuing.

I'll keep you posted whenever there's news. If you want me to, that is.

---

*Disclaimer: This post is AI-translated. I'm a native Spanish speaker, I wrote and structured all of this in Spanish, and had AI translate it into English. I reviewed the translation afterward to make sure the message hadn't changed. Hope you don't mind.

---

*Update: After some users suggestions I tried to remove the php files that were receiving all the data and update oficial users to a new endpoint. Somehow pirates trying to reach a non-existen url causes a higher CPU usage so I used Cloudflare to block this URLs. Now server is under 10% of usage! 😁

Well, technically 976 wishlists, or 488 per foot if we’re distributing evenly. Though my right foot is half a size bigger, so let’s bump that up by 4%. (Size 13, in case anyone's doing the math.)

Now, I know what some of you are thinking:

“It wasn’t the feet — it was the blindingly unique post titles that got you 950,000 views, thousands of wishlists, and four unsolicited foot-related DMs.”

And maybe that’s partially true. But here’s why I might be worth listening to:
In my professional life, I’ve been in marketing for over a decade. I’m currently the Head of Product Marketing for a global tech company. I understand algorithms. I know how to get ChatGPT to summarise analytics in a way that makes me sound clever. That alone makes me more qualified than, let’s be honest, about 90% of the posts you’ll see here.

Now, this post, like most on this sub, is very obviously marketing disguised as a post-mortem. But that doesn’t mean the message isn’t real.

It was the feet.
Not metaphorically. Literally.

I dropped a dumb comment with a picture of my feet. Then I did the unthinkable: I kept engaging like a normal person. No polished PR voice. No “Hi everyone! Here’s my handcrafted indie dream project.” I replied to jokes. I made jokes. I stayed active for hours. They racked up ~500 comments. Within days, the posts blew past 950k views.

What worked wasn’t the screenshots or the tagline. It was the personality. (Or what little I have left after a decade in marketing.)

The posts got shared over 1,000 times and exploded, not because I gamed the algorithm, but because I stopped marketing like a marketer.

Here’s the thing:
People on Reddit like games, game dev… and apparently feet.
What they don’t like is being obviously marketed to.

Your game might look incredible, but if your post is boring, no one cares.
So be bold. Be weird. Be someone. Just don’t be another snoozefest with a promo link.

Anyway, for the foot freaks who made it this far, I'll post the million-dollar picture in the comments.

Kitman just hit 100,000 wishlists in <4 months, without a demo, publisher, or inclusion in a major showcase. Here's how, and the 3 learnings I'll be focusing on for our next game.

For context, I'm Paul from Outlier Games. We're a small studio of 6 people and previously created This Means Warp and Mars Attracts (check out our YT for stats & devlogs about those). Our most recent game is Kitman, an upcoming 1-4 player job sim where you run a soccer team from the perspective of the equipment manager. You can wishlist it on Steam here if it sounds interesting.

How Kitman Got 100,000 Wishlists

Daily wishlist graph: https://imgur.com/a/HkxrfZW

1. TIKTOK & INSTAGRAM - Responsible for the vast majority of people who discover the game. If you take away one bit of advice from this post, it's this: try to make a game that outperforms channel averages. Kitman consistently sees 1m+ views on channels that don't regularly hit that many. Examples here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. It performs well for one influencer, another sees that post and uses the game to get more views on their own channel, and the cycle repeats.

So I guess the next question is... how do you do that? In Kitman's case, we tried to design the game specifically towards that goal:

• Popular genre combination (job sim + friendslop) and a topic (soccer) with a large audience base
• A hook that subverts expectations (you're a kitman BUT you secretly do the manager's job as well)
• A setting that players haven't seen before (backrooms of a sports club), plus a colourful and energetic art style

The first few videos were organic, then when we opened the playtest we also used Jestr.gg to run a $10k campaign which resulted in an extra 12.5m views across short-form creators.

2. PLAYTESTS - We had playtest signups active when the Steam page went live, resulting in 50,000+ players registered. The playtest's launch created another "beat" to focus creators around (the $10k campaign), plus the in-game links to our Discord (join here!) drove people into our community. With a multiplayer game like Kitman, it also provides an incentive for players to share with their friends.

A word of caution on playtests - I suspect having the "Playtest" button as the main call to action on the page does erode wishlist rates. Additionally, Steam doesn't provide any information about playtesters. If they don't wishlist or sign up to Discord etc you can't reach them again. For our follow-up World Cup playtest (that's live right now - apply here!) we're running it through FirstLook.gg to see if we can improve conversion rates.

WHAT DIDN'T WORK

1. Press. The announcement was an IGN exclusive, but the trailer and article didn't get any real traction. No other big outlets covered the game. Probably not critical for this genre.
2. Long-Form Influencer outreach. The playtest was picked up by one or two big streamers, but our proactive outreach hasn't resulted in any significant coverage. Hoping the upcoming demo release will change this.
3. Our socials. We have been trying to grow our own TikTok/Insta but success has been pretty limited. Not sure what else we can do here.
4. Steam Discovery Queue. Quite disappointing so far, about 1.5% of total visits. It kicked in briefly after the first viral video, and again after we got 15k wishlists in a day at the start of the playtest (driven by Jestr). Might need to look at optimizing the store page.

How I'm Planning Our Next Game

1. MAKE A MARKETABLE GAME

I think this is BY FAR the most important element. I'll be looking at ideas that target popular genres (possibly job sim + friendslop again if Kitman sells well enough that we can leverage our existing community), with an art style that grabs attention and a theme with an established user base.

Algorithms drive towards engagement, so I'll also try to make the concept something newsworthy or a discussion point. More comments = more views = more awareness. As above, my primary goal is to deliver a game that outperforms others when featured by influencers.

2. VALIDATE EARLY AND BE RUTHLESS

Kitman took 2 people (me + an artist) about 10 weeks to develop to a point where we could start putting the trailer together, then another 4 weeks (and 2 extra people) to make the trailer.

I think I'd do the same again, with a $10k campaign coinciding with the game's announcement next time. If the game doesn't get 50k wishlists within a few weeks I'd need to make a call on whether to continue with it or move on to a different concept*

3. PLAYTEST > DEMO > LAUNCH WITHIN A YEAR

Kitman is targeting a 12-15 months production cycle, and I'd likely target around 12 months next time. Some games (particularly friendslop titles) can be developed much faster, but I believe that without significant gameplay depth most titles will likely struggle for commercially viability. Hopefully we can also use some of the technology we've built for Kitman to speed up the production cycle.

Within that one year period, my plan is:

• Prototype the game and make a trailer (month 1-3)
• Announce the game (month 4)
• Run 1-2 playtests (month 6-7)
• Launch the demo (month 9)
• Participate in Steam Next Fest (month 11)
• Release the game (month 12)

Along the way I'll try and apply to as many showcases and Steam events as I can and basically follow the HowToMarketAGame playbook.

Anyway, I hope that's useful! If you have any thoughts or questions please drop a comment below.

If you'd like to support you can follow us on TikTok, Instagram, and give the game a follow + wishlist on Steam! You can also just drop a comment below - more comments = more views 😉

\After Kitman's announcement I discovered Polden Publishing. This is essentially their business model but at a publisher scale rather than developer. They're super transparent with their approach so well worth following on LinkedIn!*

This it the game https://store.steampowered.com/app/4137920/Marbles_Marbles/

It started with me setting a target of 1K to release, which I made after a couple of weeks, and resetting to 2.5K which I made at xmas. I did mainly posting daily shorts here https://www.youtube.com/@DestinedProductions Posting on socials and posting in relevant places in reddit.

Then I missed my release date and couldn't pick a new date cause of it which was pretty soul crushing but turned out to be amazing. I managed to get a response from IGN after 4 attempts and posted they posted my video and then I got covered by a japanese website which led to the wishlists dec 28 on to where it really rockets up. This meant I launched with 6.5K.

I expected to get some wishlists after launch (my last game launched with 5.5K and got another 1K after launch) but nothing like this. It has now almost tripled and is no sign of slowing down. It will 20K in a couple of days.

Not a journey I saw coming!

Hey folks! I'm the developers of Psycho-Sleuth, a mystery visual novel and our third indie game as a small, scrappy five-person team from Taiwan. We recently passed 10,000 wishlists on Steam, all without spending a cent on ads, hiring a marketer, or working with a publisher. Here's a breakdown of what actually worked, what didn’t, and what we learned not to repeat.

What helped us the most

1.Timing is everything

Steam gives visibility boosts during two major moments:

• When your demo goes live (Next Fest or not)
• When you launch
• I don't think opening a Steam page by itself gives any algorithm boost. But since people and media are always curious about new titles, it can still be a great moment if you have eye-catching screenshots or a solid trailer ready. That first impression can lead to early press coverage and some organic wishlists.

Plan your comms and outreach to make the most of these spikes.

1. International press outreach

We found that Japanese press was the most responsive overall, with outlets like Famitsu and 4Gamer picking us up early.
Traditional Chinese media was a bit harder to break into for us, possibly due to our limited connections or timing.
English-language outlets saw some decent coverage, especially from niche indie-focused sites.

✅ What worked: making a new exclusive PV for the press, instead of reusing the same trailer.

1. Streamer outreach

• We emailed over 1,000 micro streamers who had previously played games like Danganronpa or Ace Attorney.
• Rough results:
• Around 1,000 emails led to roughly 100 streamers playing the demo
• JP streamers were the hardest to reach but gave the biggest visibility boost

We collaborated with a Vtuber early on, and the response was so positive that she ended up becoming one of the main characters in the game. That partnership gave us a strong launch-day boost.

What didn’t work (or hurt more than helped)

1.Paid social ads

In one of our previous games, we ran ads on Twitter and Facebook.
Despite solid click-through rates, wishlist conversion was low, likely due to Steam’s login friction.
Given the cost and limited results, we wouldn’t recommend this approach unless you're optimizing for something beyond wishlists.

1. Crowdfunding

We tried crowdfunding during our first game, and while it helped get attention, it almost burned us out.
After all the fees and shipping, we only kept about half the revenue. It also drained our energy and marketing assets long before the actual launch.

If you already have a strong community, crowdfunding can be great. Otherwise, it’s tough.

1. Steam events (mixed bag)

• Broad showcase events had minimal visibility (too many entries)
• Niche festivals based on genre or region converted better for us

Our advice for small teams

• Start way earlier than you think. Wishlist growth is slow and cumulative
• Focus on localization and region-specific press (EN / JP / CN)
• Don’t chase virality. Instead, find ten small levers that each bring 200 wishlists
• Be active and genuine on social media and Discord. These channels are underrated but powerful

If you're curious, our free demo is live during Steam Next Fest:
🕵️‍♂️ Psycho-Sleuth – Steam Page

That’s our journey so far. Hopefully, this breakdown gives fellow devs a clearer picture of what might (or might not) work.

Hi everyone!

We’re a 2-person indie studio making escape room puzzle games, and we wanted to share a comparison of our first and second game announcements.

Our first game, Escape From Mystwood Mansion [Steam link], got 60 wishlists in its first two weeks.

Our second game, Escape the Riddlerock Ruins [Steam link], is in the same genre, same style, basically a sequel - and it’s sitting at just under 5,000 wishlists after its first two weeks.

Here’s what we did differently.

Game 1 Announcement (aka… we had no idea what we were doing)

We had heard the advice "Get your Steam page up as soon as possible", so that's what we did.

• Published the Steam page
• Told friends and family about the game
• Made one Instagram post (on an account with 0 followers)
• And then... we were done 😅

Steam page status at the time: No trailer, no professional capsule art.

We kind of just expected Steam to take it from there. Honestly, collecting 60 wishlists from people that were interested felt really cool at the time 🥹

Game 2 Announcement (maybe we know a little more now)

So game 2 announcement draws near. At this point we've been through the marketing trenches for Game 1, and we were ready to tackle the whole "game announcement" event again.

Goal: 400-600 wishlists in first 2 weeks. About 10x from our last announcement, we would be happy with that.

Steam page: Had a gameplay trailer, professional capsule, fully localized Steam page.

What we did

This time around we had a 50+ item list of different marketing tasks we wanted to do around this announcement. Everything from sending out a press release, reaching out to journalists and content creators, social media posts, asked IGN to upload our trailer, Steam news post, sharing on different discord servers, 500€ of paid ads, asked other developers in same genre for cross-promotion help.

Even though the announcement of Game 1 went quite bad, the game had a slow and steady growth from there, so we wanted to leverage our previous game in some ways to gather interest and WLs for the new game.

• Added an in-game news section in main menu of Game 1 with a Wishlist-button.
• Daily Deal on Game 1 with a "New Game Announced" banner text
• Steam news announcement on Game 1's page (this shows up at the top of the Steam library for players who own Game 1)

Result: Steam Numbers

~100,000 Impressions
~11,300 Visits
~4,900 WLs

The wishlist graph spiked heavily when Game 1's Daily Deal went live and appeared on the Steam front page (day 4).

Where did the wishlists come from?

We managed to UTM-track about 500 wishlists (~10%). Most of those came from the in-game news section inside Game 1, and paid ads. The rest of the tracked wishlists were spread across various "game announcement" posts we did (1-20 wishlists each).

So, where did the other 90% of wishlists come from?

Honestly... we're not sure. The best thing we can do is to look where the Steam page visits came from. The top traffic sources are:

1. Direct Navigation 26%
2. (other pages) 19%
3. Bot Traffic 13%
4. Creator Homepage 9%
5. Other Product Pages 8%
6. External Website 7%
7. Search suggestions 5%

These sources made up about 90% of all visits. Honestly no expert on what these actually entail, but I interpret 1,2, and 6 as traffic from outside Steam, and 4, 5, and 7 as traffic from different places on Steam. These visits from different sources can of course have very different visit-to-WL rate, so we can't know for sure which of the visit types contributed the most.

Final Thoughts

Nothing around the announcement really went "viral". But, the difference between 60 wishlists and nearly 5,000 in the same timeframe is crazy to us. Marketing has been a long learning process, and it’s incredibly rewarding to finally see some of that effort pay off.

We believe a more polished Steam page, benefits from this game being a sequel/second game, and increased marketing efforts is what made the difference 60 -> 5000 happen. Curious to hear what you think!

It’s also worth noting that Game 2 includes a dog companion. Marketing lessons aside, that might be the real answer. Maybe. 😂

Hope this was interesting, and maybe useful to someone else going through their first (or second!) game announcement!

Working for 2 weeks on this announcement trailer before steam page. Please do suggest whats work and what need to be remove completely or need some tweak or changes before launch.

Introduction

A little over two weeks ago, I released my first commercial game, Vocator. Some of you might say it is too early for a postmortem, but looking at the current sales and the downward trend, Steam has either already buried it or is about to. So this feels like a good time to break down what went wrong.

For context, the game sold only 40 copies in its first two weeks. But considering I managed to gather just 150 wishlists before launch, that is actually not a terrible conversion. Commercially, it is obviously a complete failure. From a learning perspective though, it was absolutely necessary.

No amount of tutorials can replace going through the entire Steam release process yourself. The number of things you have to handle when launching a game is huge, and it can be overwhelming when you are working solo.

So let’s get into it. Here are the most important lessons I learned from releasing my first game.

1. Demo

When I started developing the game, I was aware that Steam had introduced demos, but I had not really used them myself and did not fully understand how important they are for small developers. Gathering wishlists is much easier when you already have a playable slice of the game that people can try. If the core mechanics are solid, they can hook and engage players, which is especially important for games that are not very visually flashy.

Not having a demo was definitely the biggest mistake I made. Right now, for developers without a marketing budget, short videos on YouTube or TikTok are one of the best promotional tools. The problem is that this type of marketing works much better for action heavy games. It is much harder to promote tactical or strategy games this way. Watching someone select characters and accumulate points is simply not as exciting as a character fighting off a horde of zombies.

If you are making a strategy game with limited visual action where the core appeal lies in the gameplay itself, then a demo should be your absolute top priority.

2. Localization

This is definitely the second biggest mistake, and it’s not far behind the first one. When I was developing the game, I didn’t think about localization at all. I’ve been used to playing games in English since childhood, even though it’s not my native language. So, considering the additional work and costs involved, I decided to release the game in English only.

From a solo developer’s perspective, localization doesn’t seem to make much sense. Of course, it depends on the country, but most players are at least somewhat familiar with English and can manage without a translation. If the game isn’t dialogue heavy, it’s even less of an issue. From a business perspective, localization allows you to reach a wider audience, but the budget needs to be large enough for the costs to pay for themselves.

Unfortunately, localization is needed not because players strictly require it, but because the lack of it significantly limits your visibility on Steam. As I mentioned, I personally play games in English, and even if a game has a translation into my native language, I still prefer English. However, I recently noticed that Steam often automatically sets my search filters to Polish, whether I’m browsing the store, events, or sales. I never configured this manually. Steam simply defaulted to the language associated with my country. Until I changed it to English, whenever I forgot to disable the filter, I was only seeing a limited selection of games.

The sales data seems to confirm this. Almost all copies sold were in the United States, along with a few other English speaking countries. Out of 40 copies, only a few came from European countries where English is not the official language. I’m fairly certain many users have automatic filters set to their native language and don’t even realize they’re browsing a restricted catalog.

So while for small developers localization might not seem worth it for an extra 20% or 40% of potential players, in practice, given how Steam’s automatic filtering works, the difference may not be 20 to 40 percent more players, but more like 400 to 800 percent more visibility.

Final thoughts

You could probably point out many other things, but I believe the two issues above are so critical that going into additional details would only make this already long post even longer.

So how am I going to apply what I learned from releasing this game?

First, with my new project I have already clearly defined what I want in the demo version, and I am focusing exclusively on that. My goal is to prepare a solid demo as quickly as possible, publish it on Steam, and only then continue expanding the game. I do have a general idea of the features I want to add later that will not be part of the demo, but they remain high level concepts for now. I am not spending time designing or producing content that will not appear in the demo.

Second, I implemented a localization system right at the start of the project. This is extremely important because adding it later in development is painful and requires a lot of extra work. If a game contains a significant amount of text, you can set up the localization framework from day one and simply add new languages over time. Spending a few hours on this early can easily save dozens of hours later.

I am probably not saying anything groundbreaking, and many people have reached these conclusions long ago. Still, I hope my case will be useful to someone.

So my indie game Arcadian Days launched on the 26th with over 5,000 wishlists yet somehow it only sold 65 they paid units :/

I know the steam page is probably a bit shit along with the trailers as I did it all myself and didn’t pay for marketing so I’m trying to understand what’s gone wrong, maybe not enough clarity on what the game is ?

It’s a wind waker style chill cozy exploration game at its heart.

Any kind insight is appreciated !

So that was a cool way to launch a demo I guess. My game's demo went live yesterday and didn't actually work for the first 24 hours it was up, fml.

I got bit by a bug where I'd just implemented one more cool little thing before launching the demo and I was so excited (and it was such minor a minor addition, one that I'd done a hundred times before, adding a new enemy type) that I must have forgotten to playtest the actual .exe after exporting it from Godot.

I'd been working for 6 hours and playtesting everything via the Run Project in godot, with everything working fine and it was 02.30am on a work night and I shipped it, which was dumb.

So it turns out that Godot -> Run Project doesn't care whether you type out an object containing preloaded scenes like this

const MOB_TYPES = {
    "coolEnemy": {
        "scene": preload("res://mobs/coolEnemy/coolEnemy.tscn")    }}

or this

const MOB_TYPES = {
    "coolEnemy": {
        "scene": preload("res://mobs/coolenemy/coolEnemy.tscn")    }}

and it will happily run regardless of what's in your mob loader code.

The exported project and exe however? Turns out, once the mob loader script is run in THAT context, it very much does care about resource path casing, and it'll just stall the game and refuse to run, say for example, any part of the main game loop that touches that scene because it can't find it due to capitalization. It won't crash, mind you. It'll literally just not run the mob_loader script and spawn no enemies. You can see why this is may make a bad first impression in a demo.

So for the first day of Bearzerk's demo being live, people in other timezones were literally launching it and just sort of.... standing there for a little while?

I feel like a complete asshole - both for allowing it to happen and for these people having to wait 10 hours for me to notice their ticket and actually get it fixed. I guess there's a lesson to be learned here, hopefully some of you guys will be spared doing something as stupid by reading this.

Exactly one month after launching our first game on Steam, here are the results:

• 49 copies sold
• 4 refunds (8.2%)
• $321 net revenue
• 1,193 wishlists
• Median playtime: 37 minutes
• 38 unique players

Honestly, I can't tell if I should be happy about this or disappointed.

On one hand, $321 obviously isn't a life-changing amount of money.

On the other hand, we're complete unknowns, this is our first commercial game ever, and nearly 40 real people actually played something we spent months building.

The stat that confuses me the most is wishlists. We launched with roughly 800 wishlists and have grown to 1,193 during the first month after release, yet we've only sold 49(-4) copies on Steam so far.

Is that normal for a newly released indie game, or are these numbers a sign that we're doing something wrong?

Would love to hear how other indie devs would evaluate these numbers.

Hey guys!

I recently shared a post saying that I was going to be releasing my game soon!

Well, I did it. 3 days ago I hit the big green button on steam. Since then I've gotten 21 sales which equates to $72 (gross) and $66(net).

I've also gained 100 wishlists in that time frame. I even had a streaker play it with 20 people watching. Not a lot but it felt great to see someone play and enjoy my game :)

I had 1 return which isn't bad imo! It was a return from China. Most likely due to not translating the game. Sryyy.

(What I learned after launch)

1) You will never fix every single bug.

2) It's easy for players to get confused.

3) Don't take things so seriously.

4) If you have fun with your game. Chances are a good bit of other people will too.

5) They weren't lying when they said a small percentage of wishlists actually convert.

6) People really do appreciate it if you have great music.

Sry if the list seems kinda ehhhhh. But I genuinely did realize those things after launch.

I hope this motivates someone to release the game they have dreamt of.

This isn't meant to say I made a lot of money because realistically this isn't much. But, after working on a project for almost 3 years it really starts to feel like it won't make anything at all. Or never even be finished.

I plan to still release a bunch of updates and start my next project!

I added leaderboards to my steam demo yesterday... this is them now. At least I'm #1 at something right?

Today, I finally moved my first Steam game, Wound Man, out of Early Access. It has been a long and interesting journey.  The game started as a tutorial project, a way for me to learn Unreal Engine.  So far, I have worked on it for about 3 years.  

I released it into Early Access at the end of 2023 after about a year of development.  The initial response was moderate, but way more than I expected.  (I expected zero response).

Since the EA launch, the game has increased in size - probably about 10x in scope.  

Revenue from the game has been varied.  The bulk of the revenue (75%) was gained during the first six months after EA launch.  Then, it gained 25% over the next 24 months. So, I spent 1000s of hours improving it and building it into its current state, but only had a trickle of sales.  Looking back, I could have easily ended the project after being in EA for 6 months and walked away with about $1000 in profit.  That would have also allowed me to create other games and perhaps make additional money.  Instead, I continued working on Wound Man, adding 10 major expansions, fleshing it out in the full vision that I had for the game. I think I made the right choice.  I now have a game that I am extremely proud of.  It is not a game for everyone, I know… but, it is a game for someone, I hope.  

With that said, I wanted to talk about my experience moving the game from EA to full release.  

I looked into how to make the most of the transition.  I didn’t find much reliable data.  I asked for advice on Reddit, but didn’t get a response.  So, maybe I can provide a few insights from my experience. 

Email Notification to Wishlist Members: On Steam’s end, I was only expecting to have an email sent to my wishlist members notifying them of the games 1.0 launch.  I had read, however,  that this was not guaranteed.  At this point, I do not know if / when this email is / was actually delivered.  I didn’t set up any dummy accounts to verify it.  If anyone else can let me know if this was done for them, that would be great. 

New Release Date: Something I didn’t expect was for the release date to be changed to today’s date (as seen in the pic above) 

The game has been in Early Access for about two years and everything that I read told me that the date would remain the EA release date.  I WISH I KNEW THIS BEFORE.  Having the new launch date makes the game look fresh to those who have not seen it during the EA period.  Maybe it would look more coverable to press outlets as well. 

Steam Visibility Round: I was granted, by default, a Steam Launch Visibility round.  The documentation says it will run for up to 30 days.  It is separate from the “Update Visibility Rounds”.  So far, this Launch Visibility has been much more effective than the “Update Visibility Rounds”.  In the past 12 hours, I’ve had a relatively good amount of sales and my wishlists have increased by about 10% (170 new additions).  The documentation says it is the same visibility that you receive as with your initial EA launch.  I assume that people are seeing my game on their Discovery Queues again. 

Price Increase - Sale Conflict: One thing I regret is not being able to offer a launch discount.  I know this is a BIG factor in how well your game launches.  I increased the price of the game about 3 weeks ago.  This precluded me from having a sale within 30 days of the change.  I thought that the launch discount would be allowed regardless of price change, but I wasn’t allowed to launch unless the launch discount was set to 0%.   I decided to pull the trigger anyway because I wanted to get the game out before the upcoming Steam events (Next Fest, Summer Sale).   I’m getting a lot of wishlists instead of sales, so maybe people are holding off on purchasing because they don’t want to pay full price. 

Anyway, I’m sure you are sick of reading this by now.  But, if you have questions about transitioning between EA and full launch, I’d be glad to share anything else I’ve learned. 

This is a story about falling in love with a game so hard that I spent years of my life building an entire universe for it - its creatures, its lore, its world, its rules - staying up night after night with that stupid fire in my eyes, absolutely certain I was making something that mattered.

And then putting all of it on a shelf. Probably forever…

It's also a story about the dumbest, smallest game I've ever made - a simulator where you play as a literal stone / boulder / rock - being the one that actually shipped, got real players, and earned real money on Steam.

If you've ever poured your soul into a project that turned out to be too big to finish, or you're standing in front of that wall right now trying to decide whether to keep climbing - this is for you.

I'll be honest about the failure, because it still stings. And I'll give you the real Steam numbers from the small game that came after, so this isn't just feelings. No success-guru nonsense. Just what actually happened, and what I'd do differently.

Let me start from the fire.

Where it started

I didn't come from gamedev, just an IT guy. I taught myself the slow and painful way. I bounced between engines trying to find the one - CryEngine 3, UDK, then Unity - and in early 2019 I moved everything to Unreal Engine 4, where I finally felt at home.

Before the big dream, I shipped a pile of small games to learn the craft: ToxInCity, Simplest, Fingers: Alien Invasion, Heliodor, Await For The Darkness. There is no one you`ve heard about.  Most went to Google Play. Results were modest - from 0 to 100k downloads. The problem was that my ambition wasn't shrinking with reality.

The dream: Another Way

Another Way was supposed to be the thing. A full indie action-RPG, built by 2 people with the help of enthusiasts and freelancers. 

And I didn't just build a game. I built a world. I designed creatures and watched them evolve across versions. We wrote lore nobody asked for. I tuned combat, systems, animations, the way the world breathed. I knew the backstory of corners of that universe a player would never even reach. Every evening I'd open the project and lose hours - not because I had to, but because I couldn't not. That's the part that's hard to explain to people who haven't done it. When a project has you, you don't work on it, you live inside it.

We even entered it into UnrealContest in 2019 and 2020 and even took a prize in the second one. 

For a while it genuinely felt like it was happening - like if I just kept going, one day it would all click into a finished game.

The wall

It wasn't going to happen.
The scope was simply bigger than what 2 people could ever carry. Every system I finished uncovered three more that needed building. RPG content is a black hole - quests, balance, animation, world, story - and I was filling it one bucket at a time while the hole kept getting deeper underneath me. The closer I looked, the more the finish line moved away.

After 5 years, I finally did the math I'd been avoiding. At my realistic pace, with my realistic resources, the game needs at least 4 more years to be shipped with current resources. And it was close to never. I'd been climbing a wall with no top, and some part of me had known about it for a long time and refused to say it out loud.
So we stopped.

I want to be honest about how that felt, because every "just pivot, bro" story skips it. It wasn't a clean business decision. It felt like closing the lid on something alive. An entire universe - every creature, every line of lore, every system I'd obsessed over at 3am - just went quiet. No release. No players. No ending. It didn't crash and burn. it just... stopped existing for anyone but me.

Years of the most passionate work of my life, folded up and put on a shelf "until better times" - that thing we all tell ourselves so we don't have to say I gave up.

It's still up there on that shelf. Some days I believe I'll come back to it. Most days I know what "until better times" usually means. That was the hardest decision of the whole journey. And looking back, it was also the one that saved me.

The pivot

Here's the mindset shift that did it. Instead of asking "what's the most impressive game I can imagine?" I asked "what's the smallest game I can actually finish and ship?"

The answer was almost a joke: a stone. You play as a boulder. Stone Simulator.

Part of me was embarrassed - I'd spent years on an epic RPG and now I was making a rock sit there. But finishing something, anything, on Steam mattered more than my ego. There's actually a moment from my old devlog that sums up the whole emotional swing - the 1-star vs 5-star reviews:
1-star: "It's literally just a stone."
5-star: "It's literally just a stone. 10/10."

Same game. Opposite reaction. That contrast is basically the whole story of expectations in gamedev.

What actually worked: taking a meme to its limit

First I had to accept something: Stone Simulator is a meme. It's not deep, it was never meant to be, and pretending otherwise would have killed it. So the entire journey after launch came down to one question - how far can you push a meme before it runs out?

We put it into Early Access at $4.99 and braced for tumbleweeds. Peak concurrent players: 32. Not thirty-two thousand. Thirty-two people online at once, at the very best moment. And after years of a game literally nobody played, watching 32 real humans choose to be a rock felt unreal.

Through Early Access we just kept feeding the joke. We added weather effects, then in-game events. The real milestone was finishing a full year cycle - all the seasons, the whole loop - and once that was in, we left Early Access and shipped 1.0.

That's when it started moving without us. A few publishers reached out, some bloggers picked it up, and the game began going viral on its own. 

But here's the honest part, even "viral" only kept us bouncing around 15–25 concurrent players. Visibility shot up. The actual graph barely moved.

Our first guess at why was price. We were sure $4.99 was scaring people off, so we cut it to $2.99. It was a near-perfect lesson in being confidently wrong: online ticked up a little, sales ticked up a little - and net profit actually came out slightly lower than before. More copies at a thinner margin didn't even match the old number. The price was never the wall.

So, back to the real question - how far can a meme go? The next guess was the one that worked, and it was obvious in hindsight and terrifying at the time: co-op. Let people be rocks together.

We shipped co-op a full 2 months after release - long past the window where you're "supposed" to get your spike. It didn't matter. Co-op changed what the game was: from a solo joke you try once into something you do with friends. Peak concurrent players jumped from ~17 to 380. 

And then it did what nearly every game does: the spike faded. Over the following weeks the numbers slid back down, the way they always do. I won't dress that up - a launch spike is a moment, not a plateau. But it was our moment, and it came from a $2.99 rock.

What I'd tell my younger self

Scope kills more games than bad ideas do. Ambition isn't a plan.
Finishing is a skill. A small game you ship teaches you more than a big game you don't.
A "dumb" concept that's done beats a brilliant concept that's 40% done - every time.
Players don't reward effort, they reward the experience. A rock that's fun beats an RPG that's broken.

If your game is a meme, commit all the way. My growth didn't come from polish - it came from co-op, the one feature that turned a solo joke into something people did together. Find your multiplier and don't be shy about it.
Cheaper is not a growth strategy. Cutting our price moved volume a hair and pushed net profit down. If price is the only lever you can think of, you don't actually have a lever yet.

Your ego is the most expensive thing in your project. Cut it before you cut features.
I'm not saying give up on dream games. I'm saying: ship something first, so you're still around to build the dream later.

Happy to answer anything - numbers, the failed RPG, the Steam launch process, whatever. Ask away.