I will be honest, I don’t get Early Access. Why would teams want to subject themselves to that exposure to the community with an unfinished game? How do you navigate having the game feel good and have enough content but not TOO much content? However, the Ghost Ship Games and Funday Games teams have at least 4 games that were in early access or were recently released. Here is the list Deep Rock Galactic (1.0ed in 2020) Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor SpellRogue Don’t Die in the West So I used this as a chance to ask them some important questions about how Early Access works and whether your game ..read more

Spirit City: Lofi Sessions launched 1 week ago today and has already sold over 55,000 units. In fact, within the first 4 days it already sold 40,000 copies. The game is developed by Mooncube Games, a small, 3-person team from Montreal, Canada. The studio was created in 2021 by Keith Ebanks, Félix-Antoine Dupéré and Alexandre Gendron This game is an amazing success and in a genre that many indies probably haven’t even heard of: productivity idle game / room decorator / creature collector. To put it crassly it is a pomodoro-timer-cookie-clicker crossed with the sims crossed with Pokemon. To pla ..read more

Success metrics Last month, the developers behind the Deep Rock Galactic Survivor (DRG:S) announced that they sold over 1,000,000 copies of their game since its February Launch. We are thrilled to announce that Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor has sold 1 million copies! Thank you for joining and supporting us on this journey! Here’s a celebratory clip to mark the moment Rock & Stone! https://t.co/JKufnORhNI — Funday Games (@FundayGamesdk) March 15, 2024 DRG:S is an survivor-like (aka action-roguelike) (aka bullet-heaven) (aka Vampire Survivors-like) spinoff of the mega-popular 2018 co ..read more

Every year, I look at how many games have launched and how many have reached “Real Steam” (which I arbitrarily pick as having 1000+ reviews.) This year I want to track it throughout the year. Are we on track to have a blockbuster year of hit games? Is AI going to flood steam with thousands and thousands of generated art? In today’s blog I am looking at the games released in the first quarter of the year (Jan 1 – March 30th) About this data: I used VGInsights to filter and sort the data For the 1000+ earning games I removed games that were China-only and not translated to English. I have both ..read more

This is my rolling blog post of all the talks and interesting bits I learned while attending GDC 2024. Consider this your free conference pass. Impromptu User Study: My Uber Driver In my 25-minute ride from SFO to my hotel I had a really nice driver who was a Steam gamer. Of course, this is a perfect opportunity to do some field research. Here is how he discovers new games and what he plays: He learns about new games from Reddit. Primarily r/games, r/gaming, r/pcgaming. CZ notes: He did not mention r/indiegaming. But his preferences almost perfectly align with the most popular channels. He al ..read more

GDC is right around the corner. If you are going, or any other in-person game convention, business cards are part of every new encounter with a fellow attendee. There is this cool trick you can do where you print business cards with a unique steam key on them so that anyone who gets the card can unlock a copy of your game.  First reason to do this: you could sell them. If you are managing a booth you can sell your back catalog to people who come by and keep all the profits. They give you cash, you give them a printed card with the Key on it. You are allowed to download Steam keys free and ..read more

A lot of my post-mortems are for games that have HUGE launches where they sell 100,000 copies in their first week. It is a fantastic result but many more indies would be happy just earning a sustainable middle-class income that allows them to make more games. Is that possible? Does steam only give out success or failure and not anything in between? In today’s post I want to cover the story of Jon Nielsen and the great story of WitchHand’s launch which earned him $90,000 in the first week. He first shared this story as a twitter thread but I reached out to him to tell me more about his great st ..read more

Pal world is the most-played non-valve game on Steam right now (526,000 players) Why? Developer Pocketpair found a perfectly unmet desire in the marketplace: Pokemon… but with Guns.   Now any time a game hits it big people immediately try to think they might be able to replicate that success. In a recent blogpost I said Indies should look for opportunities to do a “fast follow” if a game becomes a hit. So can you fast follow Palworld? What else can we add guns to and have another hit? Kid Icarus with guns? Wii Fit with Guns? Chibirobo with Guns? In today’s blog post I will look as to wh ..read more

TikTok has proven to be a potent source of wishlists (read case studies of going viral on TikTok here and some TikTok tips here). However, this week I have a new TikTok strategy to potentially earn thousands of wishlists: leveraging TikTok influencers. The team behind cozy room decorator game Momento, recently earned 1,600,000 views and helped trigger bonus visibility from Steam.  Market Testing Last May the 3-person team which is a collaboration between the two studios Fat Alien Cat games and Nomo Studio market-tested their new game concept for Momento with a TikTok teaser video. @playm ..read more

The following video from Valve is a must view if you are releasing a game on Steam. “Wishlists. Do they have an impact on your visibility on Steam? No! With a big asterisks” Erik Peterson A lot of indies watched this lecture and a few have taken this statement pretty literally. I have seen a few comments in that r/gamedev subreddit that say something like “See Valve said wishlists don’t matter so why does everyone keep asking for them?” In today’s blog I wanted to dissect and explain Valve’s comment a bit more. Valve’s statement that wishlists don’t impact your visibility is technically corr ..read more