You could probably teach a whole economics course on the post-recession 2010s just by studying the meal kit delivery startup. The company epitomizes the rise and fall of the venture-subsidized downwardly-mobile millennial lifestyle that defined the era. Over the course of 11 years Blue Apron went from a peak valuation of $2 billion, to a failed IPO and tanking stock price, to a pennies on the dollar sale to Wonder, a company best known for running ghost kitchens.

Blue Apron’s vision, making home cooking accessible for the “busy person,” hinged on a mixture of shame and aspiration. Their target customer was the aging millennial knowledge worker who had just enough disposable income to buy meals on a monthly subscription service, but not enough time or motivation to imagine what they might eat for dinner. The Blue Apron customer frowns upon their counterpart, the frequent Doordasher. They instead aspire to be the type of person who makes their own meals at home. But they haven’t quite figured out the how, let alone the grocery shopping bit. So they play pretend, open up the individually packaged herbs and vegetables, follow every step on the carefully designed recipe pamphlet, simulating the feeling of cooking a meal.

The whole experience of receiving a meal kit in a box at your doorstep is a little uncanny. Just look at the text printed on the polymer gel ice packs that sit at the bottom of the box keeping the ingredients cold in transit. It instructs customers to:

1. CLEAN AND DRY: Empty non-toxic contents into trash and dry.

2. SET ASIDE: Don’t recycle me with your curbside items!

3. RECYCLE: Visit www.plasticfilmrecycling.org for drop-off locations.

So the Blue Apron customer, who is supposedly too busy to go grocery shopping, is expected to drop off their Blue Apron trash at a dedicated recycling center? To be a Blue Apron customer is to be conflicted, to feel simultaneously ashamed and aspirational. But the Blue Apron customer can only sit with this tension for so long. They’d eventually churn up (seek out better recipes and cheaper groceries in bulk) or churn down (open up DoorDash and receive a fully cooked meal at their doorstep without having to worry about all those dishes).

It’s fitting that Blue Apron is destined to live out the rest of its days in the shadow of a ghost kitchen.

With the end of the ZIRP era and the beginning of the age of the hyperscaler, you’d be forgiven for thinking this cycle will be different. But there’s a new generation of startups with visions of the future eerily similar to that of Blue Apron. A vision where the past is celebrated, the status quo of the present is rejected, and the future is found within the walls of a garden built by the latest startup selling you the life you aspire to. Among those is Wabi, a “personal software platform” that raised $20 million in November last year and has yet to launch out of beta. Wabi’s homepage describes their vision:

Many years ago Apple told us: there was “an app for that”. And for a while, it felt like there was. Social media. Games. Creation tools. Utilities. The App Store felt boundless.

But year after year, our home screens remain largely the same. Visions of a rich, diverse marketplace gave way to a new bundle. A dozen apps produced by a handful of mega- corporations.

And so, we pick our clothes. Our tunes. Our furniture. But our apps? They’re still one-size-fits-all. Made for billions. Not for us.

Just as Blue Apron sold the feeling of being someone who cooks without requiring you to actually become that person, Wabi sells the feeling of being someone with taste and agency (Silicon Valley’s favorite new words). The Wabi user apparently has problems that are far too bespoke to be solved by mass market solutions. Wabi envisions its users as too good for TikTok, but too busy to roll their own software. Wabi is the Easy-Bake Oven of software. The problem is, as explained in a recent essay on vibe coding1, most people’s problems are not software-shaped:

If you tell a friend they can now instantly create any app, they’ll probably say “Cool! Now I need to think of an idea.” Then they will forget about it, and never build a thing. The problem is not that your friend is horribly uncreative. It’s that most people’s problems are not software-shaped, and most won’t notice even when they are.

The companies that will struggle in this cycle are the ones occupying the same uncomfortable middle ground Blue Apron did: too aspirational to solve real problems, too shallow to deliver on the aspiration. Their customers will eventually churn up or churn down, and these companies will join the rest of the midwits in the ghost kitchen.

These tools are still inaccessible to non-technical users. They’re framed by the fairly impenetrable interfaces of the terminal and the IDE. But that’s changing (see the write up from Every on Claude Cowork, released earlier this week).

These tools will soon be coming for game development, and they will completely redefine how games are made. Making a video game requires the mastery of two very technical disciplines: programming and asset creation. Fully autonomous programming has arrived and asset creation is not far behind. Meshy allows users to generate 3D models with a prompt. Runway’s GWM Worlds takes this a step further, enabling users to create navigable virtual worlds on the fly.

There will be many game developers and players who will reject these new workflows. Games are very hard to make and involve spending tens of thousands of hours learning to manipulate a patchwork of esoteric software. Game developers take pride in their mastery of these tools. What happens when the technicality of their skills is no longer valued? Game developers, who were previously seen as wizards able to conjure great spells with strings of symbols that look like gibberish to most, will soon be replaced by the most accessible tool of all: plain language.

The bottleneck for success in games will remain the same: making something that people care about. Games that previously took years and hundreds of team members to make will soon be prompted in an afternoon. What will game creators and game enjoyers be left with in this new era?

We will be left with something simple and pure: the beauty of games. We will be left with what philosopher C. Thi Nguyen describes in his new book The Score:

Games play around with who you are, what you care about, and the basic shape of your relationships to other people. Games reach into you and give you a new form of agency, and you can, for a while, become completely absorbed in that new agency. And what enables that, in crucial part, is the clarity, the simplicity, and the unambiguity of the scoring system. Games let somebody else design a new self for you, for you to slip into.

Games grant us a precious experience of clarity. It is a clarity of purpose—a clarity of value. In a game, for once in our lives, we know exactly what we’re supposed to be doing, and afterward, we know exactly how well we have done.

Games offer value clarity. They are an existential balm for the confusion of ordinary life.

From Roblox this week:

As we kick off 2026, we’re scaling our advertising platform with new formats and tools designed to solidify Roblox as an essential channel where brands can measure results and build authentic, lasting connections with Gen Z and Gen Alpha users. At CES, we announced a brand-new homepage format, expanded our programmatic partnerships, and showcased strategic brand partnerships that provide marketers with more control, transparency, and options to drive meaningful results.

We want to transform how brands engage with audiences, moving beyond static ads to deliver truly immersive, user-first experiences. We’re focused on driving both reach and meaningful results by introducing premium formats that launch seamlessly, and are native to the platform and valued by our community.

Roblox has previously experimented with more typical mobile ad formats. In the hit game Grow A Garden, for example, users can choose to watch a 6 second video ad instead of waiting 3+ minutes for their seeds to restock at the seed shop. Roblox calls this format rewarded video ads:

Rewarded Video ads enable users to opt in and watch up to 30-second full-screen video ads within immersive Roblox games and experiences. In return, users receive in-game benefits from the creators of these games and experiences, also known as the ad publishers. Early tests show an average completion rate over 80%, with select experiences seeing completion rates over 90% as users saw the value in rewards, such as power-ups or in-game currency, and considered these ads additive to their overall experience.

The history of advertising in video games can be traced back to Tapper, an arcade game published in 1984 by Bally Midways that was sponsored by Anheuser-Busch and tasked players with slinging Budweiser to demanding customers. The game was originally intended to be distributed in bars, but was subsequently transformed into the un-branded, more teen-friendly Root Beer Tapper for arcades.

In 2000, Sega ported the racing game Crazy Taxi to the Dreamcast and expanded in-game destinations to include KFC, Pizza Hut, and a Levi’s store. In contrast with Tapper, the product placement in Crazy Taxi was subtle. Sega introduced the possibility for integrated ads. The product being advertised wasn’t the basis for the game, but was instead believably integrated into the fantasy of the game itself.

More recently, with Fortnite, Epic Games has fully embraced this integrated, native ads model. New seasons of Fortnite regularly feature branded collaborations in the form of custom skins, items, and locations. This growing list of companies is wide-ranging and includes Marvel, DC, Ralph Lauren, Nike, John Wick, Resident Evil, WWE and most recently, The Simpsons. From Fortnite’s press release in November:

Drop from the Battle Bus into... Springfield? The 80-player Springfield Island features a fast-paced, back-to-basics Battle Royale experience straight from the minds behind The Simpsons. Giant donuts will fall from the sky and angry clones will roam the streets, but don’t worry, Homer Simpson is in charge. Check out Delulu for new Simpsons weapons during the Season and prepare for a month of gags, gadgets, and Simpsons animated shorts!

Advertising in games isn’t without its critics. In 2023, Ubisoft faced backlash for placing a full-screen pop up ad in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. As The Verge explained:

Ubisoft is blaming a “technical error” for a fullscreen pop-up ad that appeared in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey this week. Reddit users say they spotted the pop-up on Xbox and PlayStation versions of the game, with an ad appearing just when you navigate to the map screen. “This is disgusting to experience while playing,” remarked one Reddit user, summarizing the general feeling against such pop-ups in the middle of gameplay.

In the case of Assassin's Creed, the ad wasn't even for another product but for the latest game in the franchise itself. The outcry from players is understandable. Part of the appeal of a AAA game like Assassin's Creed is full immersion in its fantasy world, and a fullscreen pop-up breaks the fourth wall. Had Ubisoft natively integrated the ad into the game itself, perhaps as an NPC or location, players might not have felt swindled. Instead, Ubisoft broke a long held, unspoken agreement: buying a premium game means no ads.

This cynical view of advertising is shared by critics across other industries. According to Ethan Zuckerman, advertising is the “original sin” of the web. As Ben Thompson quotes Zuckerman, an associate professor of public policy, information, and communication at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, in his article The Agentic Web and Original Sin:

I have come to believe that advertising is the original sin of the web. The fallen state of our Internet is a direct, if unintentional, consequence of choosing advertising as the default model to support online content and services. Through successive rounds of innovation and investor storytime, we’ve trained Internet users to expect that everything they say and do online will be aggregated into profiles (which they cannot review, challenge, or change) that shape both what ads and what content they see. Outrage over experimental manipulation of these profiles by social networks and dating companies has led to heated debates amongst the technologically savvy, but hasn’t shrunk the user bases of these services, as users now accept that this sort of manipulation is an integral part of the online experience.

Thompson, by contrast, views internet advertising as a win-win-win for both users, content makers, and advertisers:

The original web was the human web, and advertising was and is one of the best possible ways to monetize the only scarce resource in digital: human attention. The incentives all align:

• Users get to access a vastly larger amount of content and services because they are free.

• Content makers get to reach the largest possible audience because access is free.

• Advertisers have the opportunity to find customers they would have been never able to reach otherwise.

Yes, there are the downsides to advertising Zuckerman fretted about, but everything is a trade-off, and the particular set of trade-offs that led to the advertising-centric web were, on balance, a win-win-win that generated an astronomical amount of economic value.

I agree with Thompson here. Ads are not inherently bad. They enable the creation and distribution of content at a scale that simply wouldn't be possible through paid models alone.

Some recent internet-native media companies have fully embraced ads in what feels like a contrarian move amidst popular culture's largely cynical view of advertising. Take the live business and tech podcast TBPN, for example, which treats its content like the surface of an F1 car. Since launching in October 2024, TBPN has inserted ads anywhere and everywhere: beneath their live news ticker, on their X banner, and even scattered across the sleeves and shoulders of their limited-release rugby shirt.

Today’s answer to The New York Time puzzle game Strands presents us with a novel integrated ad format. Well, at least I’m pretty sure it’s an ad. Solve the puzzle and you’ll find that the answer was themed around The Traitors, which turns out to be a show (I had to look it up) with a new season conveniently dropping the same day on Peacock.

In a 2023 feature for Vanity Fair, an NYT staffer said “Times is now a gaming company that also happens to offer news.” The team at NYT Games seems to have a deep understanding of their audience and format. Play the games regularly and you’ll find yourself opening up a tab to search words you’re unfamiliar with. The ad for The Traitors takes advantage of this: a significant portion of players probably haven’t heard of the show, and for those who are already fans, they get the satisfaction of solving a puzzle themed around a show they like. The success of this ad format lies in its smooth integration and novelty. If the puzzle quality drops or promotion-themed puzzles become too frequent, NYT Games could risk losing players’ trust.

Reach a certain scale and ads become inevitable. As The Information reported a couple weeks ago, even OpenAI, which has been publicly resistant to ads, is changing its tune:

Publicly at least, CEO Sam Altman has downplayed OpenAI’s desires to be an advertising powerhouse. But over the past year, OpenAI has been staffing up with digital advertising veterans and adding shopping features that could be springboards into retail-focused ads.

The company sees an opportunity to create a new type of digital ads, said another person with knowledge of the effort, rather than simply replicating existing formats like social media ads. OpenAI collects a lot of information about users’ interests from detailed chats, and has considered whether ChatGPT could show ads based on that history, The Information has previously reported. Analysts and ad industry executives say that ChatGPT conversations where users are clearly looking to buy something could be an advertising goldmine.

The surface of advertising will continue to expand and evolve. Whether users feel tricked or immersed depends entirely on the quality and integration of the ad itself.

The most recent example of this can be seen in the countless replies to a relatively innocuous post on X by indie developer and aspiring influencer Gorka Games. In this post, the OP argued that solo developers shouldn’t make big open world games and instead should make games in trending genres like friendslop. The post went viral, with developers eagerly filing in to give their take on why Gorka’s advice was bad and offensive. Their takes ranged from thoughtful to somewhat incensed. Well… mostly incensed. Here’s a few:

Developer of the upcoming extraction shooter Beautiful Light (760K wishlists) responded decrying that you shouldn’t chase success, but you should follow your passion:

Developer of the casual digging game Cozy Holes (est. $3K gross) argued that you should buck trends and “make something you love, make something authentic to you.”

Developer of the upcoming post apocalyptic exploration game Garbage Country (72K wishlists) kept it concise:

I could rattle off a few more, but you get the point. To summarize the nearly 200 replies and quotes:

• Chasing success is morally bankrupt

• Following trends is morally bankrupt

• Caring about what players like is morally bankrupt

Crazy stuff if you ask me. Why do so many indie developers think this way? It’s not like players are dying to bear witness to [insert random developer]’s authentic self. Trends are trends because people like them. Players are pleased, even thrilled, to get more games in genres they love. Sales figures and reviews for recent hit games in trendy genres like RV There Yet (est. $20.6M gross) and CloverPit (est. $10M gross) prove this. While the thread from Gorka Games is a little clunky, it echoes perspectives shared by prominent games market analysts Chris Zukowski and Simon Carless. Simply put: make a great game in a proven genre that players love and you’re more likely to find commercial success. Seems pretty uncontroversial.

Yet, the anti-trend trend marches on. But don’t get it twisted… this sort of sentiment isn’t unique to games. It’s a tale as old as time.

In the early 2010s, I ran a DIY music venue and gallery with some close friends and became intimately familiar with the concerns of independent artists. They were the same then as they’ve always been: strongly held beliefs in the value of individualism, authenticity, and self-expression and a repulsion to selling out. Making something for yourself, your friends, or for the scene? That’s good. But chasing success among the masses? That’s bad.

In August earlier this year, the popular fashion and culture newsletter Blackbird Skyplane offered their own version of this all-too-familiar argument against selling out (excuse their idiosyncratic and slightly hard to parse writing style):

So we reject the widespread attitude that Success = Major Bag Getting and “Big Things Coming.”

And what’s heartening to us is that we’re not alone. It can be easy to forget, because as a society it feels like we’re drowning in counter-evidence, but lots of people wish that small, special things could just stay that way, instead of their creators saying yes to every check, expanding senselessly while “chasing 10x,” and putting a bunch of dumb s--t into the world that no one asked for and no one wants.

Please be clear: We are rightly regarded as the Most Unsanctimonious sletter out. But we think the anti-sellout ethos is tight, and worth talking about, especially here in 2025, long past the concept’s supposed expiration date — not least because it can help make all of us feel less cynical, defeated, lonely and insane.

Blackbird Skyplane is #2 on the bestselling fashion charts on Substack. They’ve had profiles in the New Yorker, The New York Times, and Vanity Fair. It’s hard to know exactly, but they probably make high five figures to low six figures per month on Substack. Not bad for a team of two.

Why is it that the loudest sellout haters are often those who have already found great commercial success? Don’t fall for their anti-sellout psyop.

In their post, Blackbird Skyplane continue by offering up Billboard-charting musician Mac DeMarco as the ultimate anti-sellout icon. They highlight his recent rejection of big arena shows, in favor of DIY venues and share a recent New Yorker profile that frames DeMarco’s anti-sellout moves as refreshing and radical:

It’s easy now, possibly advantageous, not to think too critically about the machinery that motivates culture, especially when nobody has to worry about getting called a poser or a sellout. Anything goes. In that context, DeMarco’s gestures at sovereignty feel less cranky and more radical. He is simply trying to reclaim some ground.

In the same New Yorker profile, DeMarco goes on to explain that “Purity and cohesiveness are more important to me at this point than if people like the songs.” To DeMarco, songs aren’t for listeners. Sounds familiar. For the take-givers in Gorka’s viral post, games don’t seem to be for players either.

Thankfully, I have some thoughtful counter examples to tear us away from all this madness. Contrary to what Blackbird Skyplane or Mac DeMarco might have you believe, making music for listeners and games for players is just fine. And making money and reaching the masses while doing so should be celebrated. Economist and author Tyler Cowen explains in his book In Praise of Commercial Culture published in 2000:

Bach, Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven were all obsessed with earning money through their art, as a reading of their letters reveals. Mozart even wrote: “Believe me, my sole purpose is to make as much money as possible; for after good health it is the best thing to have.” When accepting an Academy Award in 1972, Charlie Chaplin remarked: “I went into the business for money and the art grew out of it. If people are disillusioned by that remark, I can’t help it. It’s the truth.”

A couple more examples: cofounder of Kickstarter Yancey Strikler and founder of Brud Trevor McFedries (he and his team created the fictional influencer Lil Miquela) see the anti-sellout discourse as outdated, while producing work for the algorithm and making some money in the process is punk.

And finally, Emily Sundberg of Feed Me offers some great related insight in a Bloomberg podcast interview (that narrowly characterizes her as a Gen Z-soothsayer):

[Host]: I wanted to talk about Gen Z and capitalism. Because I feel like millennials and maybe Gen X, but millennials in particular had this love/hate relationship [with capitalism]. [They] sort of apologized for wanting money and were sort of ambivalent about it. And I get the impression that the younger generation is much more comfortable with [saying] “yeah we want to make a ton of money”

[Emily Sundberg]: Yeah, selling out is cool. I think one thing that is very clear about Gen Z is they’ve repeatedly been told: nobody is coming to save you. You’re going to graduate into a job market that barely exists. And if you get a job, you might not even have a desk or an office to go into…You hear this sense of: get the bag while the world is still here to make some money out of it.

Let’s get into it…

• Why do some games flop? had a great conversation with about what it takes to break through in today’s game market.

• Can you predict a hit? Ben Thompson points out that the massive success of K-Pop Demon Hunters was a surprise even for Netflix execs themselves. Netflix’s co-CEO explains that “[…] we had a film that people fell in love with, that’s first and foremost. But not in a huge way on the first day or even the first weekend. In fact, it was the super fans who watched the movie and repeat watched the movie that drove the recommendation engine that got it in front of more super fans who also fell in love with the movie. So that ease and value that allowed folks to repeat view it.”

• Notes on horror. provides a compelling breakdown on the art of horror including a note on video games: “When we consider the physical and intellectual facts of fear, we can quickly deduce the medium that best accommodates the horror artist: video games. By requiring one’s physical participation (one must move the joystick forward) and intellectual focus (one must look, listen, and solve problems), video games create the most important condition in which fear can develop: vulnerability.”

Now for the typing games I played this week. First up, S.P.L.I.T:

• There’s a growing subcategory of indie games that are set within a single claustrophobic room. Among these are the escape room deckbuilding roguelike Inscryption (est. $43.3M gross), the creepy psychological horror idler Clickolding (est. $94K gross), and recent hit slot machine roguelike CloverPit (est. $9.9M gross). The originator of the mascot horror microgenre, Five Nights at Freddy’s (est. $8.6M gross), could be said to fit into this category as well—while the game technically takes place within a large Chuck E. Cheese-style arcade, the player is confined to a small office where they monitor

  security feeds of the various rooms and hallways around them. Upcoming title PVKK (est. 754K wishlists) fits within the category as well with the player operating a “planetary defense cannon” inside a “cozy bunker”.

• For indie teams, the appeal of this “small room” format is clear: setting a game within a single room naturally constrains your scope. If a player can’t even leave the room where they start the game then you can bypass the infamous door problem of game design entirely.

• Developer Mike Klubnika has embraced this “single room” format in two of his games, first with massive hit roguelike horror Buckshot Roulette (est. $15.8 gross) and more recently with his atmospheric typing game S.P.L.I.T (est. $110K gross).

• In S.P.L.I.T, your movement is limited to switching between the fixed views of some computer monitors on your desk in front of you, a small window overlooking a forest to your left, and a pelican case containing some esoteric hardware on your right. The typing mechanics include spamming random buttons to fill out pre-scripted lines of dialogue in an IRC chat room, entering actual UNIX commands to navigate a DOS-style computer interface, and typing out floating words in the air.

• S.P.L.I.T is impressively economical. Like last weeks recommendation Unfair Flips, S.P.L.I.T elicits a strong sense of a drama with a very minimal set of components. 90% of the game you stare at an old CRT monitor spitting out lines and lines of fairly technically dense directory structures and commands that you must decipher. From the electro soundtrack, to the grungy visuals, and the subtle screen shake effects, the game simply has The Juice. Daniel Lyozov of Oro Interactive, who happens to be the publishing partner for S.P.L.I.T, lays it out in a recent post on X:

  

And next, Final Sentence:

• The battle royale genre is thought to be mostly inaccessible for indie teams due to the fact that it requires complex network code and ongoing maintenance of cloud servers to support upwards of 100 players in a single match. The early breakout hits of the genre were all AAA titles with massive budgets including PUBG, Fortnite, and Call of Duty: Black Ops 4.

• In 2020, Fall Guys illustrated the potential for slightly smaller teams (35 in the case of Fall Guys) to fuse the last-man-standing format with game mechanics not derived from the first/third person shooter. Popular game engines like Unity and Unreal Engine and multiplayer cloud services like AWS GameLift and Azure PlayFab have recently enabled much smaller teams to explore the weird and wild gameplay possibilities of 100 player matches.

• Final Sentence (est. 220K wishlists) is a battle royale typing game set to release early next year that was developed by a team of just 3 people. You sit in a large room and type out sentences on a typewriter while a masked stranger holds a gun to your head ready to pull the trigger if you make too many mistakes. If you’re the first to finish without getting shot you win the match.

• As 4 player friendslop games continue to grow in popularity (see RV There Yet which released last week and has already grossed over $5M), there’s a real opportunity for more indie teams to tackle the battle royale format.

• RV There Yet offers a formula for success in the friendslop microgenre that is just as applicable to future explorers of the experimental battle royale format. Strike the right mix of novelty and familiarity and execute on the fun and you’re likely to break through. A good sign is being able to describe the core appeal of your game in one short phrase: in the case of Final Sentence the game essentially sells itself with just three words “battle royal typing.”

And finally, some releases I’m keeping an eye on:

• Friendslop survival horror game Mimesis (out October 27th with 340K est. wishlists) is coming to early access and looks like an interesting take on the genre with a social deduction mechanic where enemy NPCs copy your voice and movements and you must determine friends from foes.

• Cut That Wire (est. $17K gross) came out last week and quickly reached over 200 reviews. It’s a bomb diffusing co-op take on the Buckshot Roulette formula.

Thanks for reading and have a great week.

Let’s get into it…

• Everything is television: I was surprised to learn that Netflix has 36,000 hidden microgenres. Among them is “casual viewing” which includes shows “made to half-watch while doing laundry.”

• The return of fun: Roy Price argues that many recent movies are failing at the box office because they aren’t fun enough. “If you’re not fun, you’d better be a masterpiece, and that’s a bad bet.”

• The risk of dismissing AI content: Doug Shapiro says that media companies who fail to continually update their definition of quality are at risk of being disrupted. “Dismissing all AI content as slop smacks of cultural elitism and applies a value judgment about what is and what isn’t ‘quality.’ I think this is a mistake.”

• What comes after postmodernism? Alex Danco says it’s the prediction era. “Prediction helps us break free from postmodern malaise, and gives us a new purpose in the world: we create order in the universe by contributing information.”

• Is the games market reaching a point of over-saturation? Are wishlists still a useful metric on Steam?

• My very dear friends, and the best music writers around, recently launched a music recommendation newsletter on Substack called , that you should absolutely subscribe to. I was inspired by them to share some of my own game recommendations with you. Here are a couple of games that have been on my radar this past week that I think you should play.

First, Unfair Flips:

• The start menu for Unfair Flips ($1.99, 741 reviews, 92% positive) contains a single button labeled “FLIP”. Click this button and the bronze coin in front of you immediately flicks into the air. As the coin lands, the game’s logo fades away to reveal what seems to be a wojak wearing a bear mask sitting in an empty bar sipping a cocktail. If you’re lucky enough to have your first coin flip land on heads, you’ll hear the solitary twang of a midi guitar note ring out and receive a $0.01 reward. A scrolling text box then takes over the middle of the screen logging all of your subsequent flips. Some additional text within this box explains that, in order to win, you must get 10 heads in a row. The text continues: “This could happen immediately. Or it could happen never. This is the entire game.” The twist is, you start the game with just a 20% chance of the coin landing on heads. With these odds, if my math is correct, you could expect to succeed once in every 9.8 million tries.

• Thankfully, you have some upgrades to tip the scales in your favor. These include: increase the base value of the coin, increase the multiplier for money earned from heads combos, decrease the time it takes for the coin to flip (essential), and most importantly, increase the chances that the coin lands on heads. Unfair Flips is a game filled with all the highs and lows of much more mechanically or narratively dense games, but with the drama distilled to the click of a single button.

My next recommendation is Q-UP:

• Q-UP (demo available on Steam) is the perfect counterpart to Unfair Flips, the tails to its heads. Q-UP, like Unfair Flips, is a coin flipping game played mostly with one button. You click “Q-UP” on the main menu, the game’s equivalent of a “ready up” button, which initiates a fake matchmaking loading screen (the game is single player). After a few seconds you’re quickly met with a large coin sitting in a futuristic airplane hangar while an atmospheric d&b soundtrack kicks in. Get three coin flips to land on your team’s side and you win the match. To be clear, none of these turns are actually “played” by the player. In fact, as a player you’re not doing much of anything at all. Each sequence is triggered automatically like the turns in an auto battler, and the only time you’ll click again after starting a match is hitting “OK” on a very persistent level up screen.

• Q-UP is extremely self-aware and regularly breaks the fourth wall in the style of Stanley Parable ($24.99, 22K reviews, 94% positive) or Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy ($7.99, 39K reviews, 84% positive). Playing the game reveals meta commentary about the game itself. Put another way, Q-UP is to live service games as Cabin In The Woods is to horror movies.

• Q-UP was developed in part by Frank Lantz, creator of the incremental game Universal Paperclips and the Founding Chair of the NYU Game Center. Lantz describes Q-Up as the “spiritual sequel to Universal Paperclips, where the number you are making go up is your rating in the semi-fictional game at the heart of the game.”

• As you play a few more matches you accrue resources and come to understand that just beneath the parody-laden surface, there’s a super compelling big-number strategy game. You subsequently spend most of your time in the dense skill tree or shop menus optimizing your buildout in order to increase resource payouts when winning, or in some cases, intentionally losing. One Steam review explains, “I lost some games and the numbers went up. I also won some games and the numbers went up.”

• Q-UP is what I would call a deconstructed eSport, to reference the 2010s music subgenre deconstructed club. Deconstructed club involved artists using the tools of popular dance music to create experimental music not quite made for dancing. In more recent years, the sounds of deconstructed club have been re-constructed back into the club with artists like Charli xcx reaching mainstream popularity. Playing Q-UP, you experience a similar cycle—after a few matches you begin to lose yourself in the thrill of the coin flip. After many more matches you might even forget, for a moment, that the game is a spoof on anything at all.

And finally, some games coming out this week that I’m keeping an eye on:

• Friendslop driving game RV There Yet (releases October 27th)

• Gamestonk Simulator: Gone Rogue (releases October 20th) is a riff on the job simulator specialty shop management formula popularized by Supermarket Simulator ($19.99, 29K reviews, 94% positive) and TCG Card Shop Simulator ($12.99, 29K reviews, 97% positive).

Thanks for reading and have a great week.

The release of Pong for the at-home market in 1975 effectively kicked off the modern video games industry as we know it. Within the broader scope of the entertainment industry, games are relatively young. The Victor Talking Machine Company, one of the first major record labels, was founded in 1901. Auguste and Louis Lumière hosted their first commercial film screening in a theater in Paris in 1895. The music and film industries saw more than seven decades of rapid growth and billions of dollars in commercial activity before video games even existed. But in the last ten years, music and film began to lag behind games within an increasingly zero-sum attention economy. Matthew Ball explains:

[…] the real challenge for Hollywood is that for decades, whenever “leisure” won over “work”, TV was the primary beneficiary. In recent years, the leisure decision has changed or “moved up” a level. It used to be “what to watch” and now it’s “whether to watch” – and the answer is increasingly “no, I’m going to play a game”. Neither Netflix nor Hollywood has a good solution for this problem. And no one chooses not to game because there’s a branching narrative available instead.

As I shared in my recent post 50 things for game developers, it has never been easier to make games. Like many other independent game developers, I am entirely self-taught largely thanks to all of the free educational resources available in the form of podcasts, newsletters, blogs, and videos. Over the years, I’ve gathered hundreds of useful talks and video essays on YouTube about making games. Below, I’ve narrowed this list down to the 10 best videos you should watch to become a better game developer.

Let’s get into it…

1. Start with understanding what actually makes a game successful

2. Then go “shopping” for new game ideas

3. Next come up with an appealing fantasy instead of a hook

4. But remember, your goal is to actually ship something

5. Just make sure you don’t ship the wrong game

6. Think of your game as a “series of interesting decisions”

7. Beware of these “cursed” problems in game design along the way

8. Make sure you playtest early and often

9. Make a great tutorial, it’s more important than you might think

10. Finally, once you’re sure you’ve made a good game, follow these best practices for marketing

Thanks for reading and have a great day.

It’s as good a time as any to ask: why do so many games fail to break through on Steam? The answer, in some ways, is simple. There are between 24 to 37 million players on the platform at any given time, but only a very small percentage of those players buy more than one game per month. According to research by Mat Piscatella of Circana:

Hyper enthusiast, price-insensitive players are really keeping things going, especially in the non f2p gaming space. According to Circana’s Q3 2025 Future of Games, only 4% of US video game players buy a new game more often than once per month, with a third of players not buying any games at all.

Steam is clearly aware of this dynamic. The parameters of the Steam algorithm aren’t public, but it would be a good bet to say the algorithm is designed with these “hyper enthusiast, price-insensitive players” in mind. Steam takes 30% of every sale, so the more games that succeed, the more money Steam makes. Steam and game developers have the same goal, we both want our games to sell more copies.

According to Chris Zukowski’s yearly research, the number of indie and AA games that succeed (reaching HTMAG’s benchmark of 1,000 reviews) on Steam has grown steadily along with the total number of games released. Although, the percentage of games that succeed each year is shrinking slightly:

• 2022: 337 games reached 1,000+ reviews out of 12,304 total games (2.74%)

• 2023: 354 games reached 1,000+ reviews out of 13,834 total games (2.56%)

• 2024: 445 games reached 1,000+ reviews out of 18,239 total games (2.44%)

That’s a lot of games. Why exactly were over 17,000 of them from 2024 commercial failures? There are a few obvious reasons. A good number of these games are hobby projects that never had the goal of reaching a wider audience. Others were made by first time developers that didn’t quite reach an expected level of quality within their respective genres. And many others didn’t follow necessary discoverability steps including releasing a demo and sharing it with YouTubers and Twitch streamers—this week only 21% of new releases have a demo.

But what about all the other games that were well made, released a demo, and followed marketing best practices as recommended by HTMAG, GameDiscoverCo, and others. Why did those games fail? At first glance, it feels like impossible question. The common refrain is…it all comes down to luck. Games are more of an art than a science after all and some games just have “the magic”. There’s no real way to tip the scales in your favor.

I disagree wholeheartedly. I believe it’s possible to increase your surface area for luck as Cate Hall explains in her essay:

One distinguishing feature I’ve noticed among people who are unusually successful is that they just try a lot of stuff — socially, intellectually, professionally. It’s the rate of experimentation, the number of shots on goal, that provides the magic, not the percentage of successes, which might be very low at first.

It sounds stupidly simple, but it’s profound: the more times you interact with the outside world, the more chances you have to get lucky — to find the collaborators, friends, and projects that, together, provide the right soil for you to bloom in.

For game developers, this translates to a couple tasks in particular: make more games and closely study the market. Doing so will increase your surface area for luck, and in turn boost the chances that you’ll make something that hits amidst the crowded sea of indie games on Steam. Some of the most successful indie developers understand this well. Gavin Eisenbeisz, developer of Choo-Choo Charles, says he spent 6 months doing market research before ultimately setting out to create the upcoming co-op prison break game CUFFBUST (releasing October 15th with 241K est. wishlists).

There are one to a few hundred premium-priced games released on Steam every week. I view the Steam pages for each and every one (so that you don’t have to). This week, I provide analysis on three upcoming games that broke far beyond the 10K wishlist barrier (roughly the number of wishlists you’ll need to appear on Steam’s coveted popular upcoming section on the homepage). I also look at three games that failed to reach this 10K wishlist threshold (2.8K, 2.2K, and 216 wishlists respectively). As Stephen King outlines in his book On Writing, we can learn just as much from the flops as we can from the hits:

If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut. I’m a slow reader, but I usually get through seventy or eighty books a year, mostly fiction. I don’t read in order to study the craft; I read because I like to read. It’s what I do at night, kicked back in my blue chair. Similarly, I don’t read fiction to study the art of fiction, but simply because I like stories. Yet there is a learning process going on. Every book you pick up has its own lesson or lessons, and quite often the bad books have more to teach than the good ones.

Let’s get into it…

Probable Hits

What can we learn from these games that reached 10K wishlists and far above?

Escape from Duckov

Estimated wishlists: 470K
Release date: October 15, 2025
Steam page created: 15 months ago
Demo info: Released in January and May 2025 / No available review data, demo store page was taken down by the developers

A single-player top-down looter-shooter game. Loot, escape, build, and eventually become a mighty bird soldier. Beware! If you are knocked down, items in your inventory will be lost! But don’t worry. With your infrastructure built nicely, you will rise again soon.

• Escape from Duckov is brilliant from a games discoverability perspective. It unabashedly rips the proven extraction formula popularized by Escape from Tarkov, strips out the multiplayer, and replaces the hyper-realistic gritty art style with colorful low poly environments and cartoon ducks.

• An article covering the Escape from Duckov demo published in GamesRadar earlier this year claimed the extraction shooter genre is oversaturated saying: “I’m no massive fan of the extraction shooter, but I know that what Escape From Tarkov has achieved in a genre that’s become so crowded as to be almost cursed is nothing short of remarkable”. Games journalists are quick to claim that emerging genres are oversaturated. They do it all the time. Don’t listen to them! They’re wrong. In fact, the extraction shooter genre is one of the least oversaturated and best performing genres on all of Steam. There are just 155 extraction shooters on Steam in total. The genre has a median gross revenue of $21K and 39% of extraction shooters have grossed over $100K. For comparison sake, there are 12,280 2D platformers on Steam. The genre has a median gross revenue of $230 and just 4% of 2D platformers have a median gross revenue over $100K.

• Given the clear undersaturation of the genre, we’re bound to see many more games morph and expand on the extraction framework. Recent examples include SULFUR (2,932 reviews) which fuses extraction mechanics with roguelike progression systems, Deadly Days: Roadtrip (1,519 reviews) follows a survivor-like structure, and ZERO Sievert (7,336 reviews) strips things down even further by bringing a pixelated top-down perspective to the Tarkov format.

• Team Soda, developer of Escape from Duckov, had a unique strategy when it came to releasing the demo for the game. They had two time-limit demo releases, one from January to February and another from May to July corresponding with Steam Next Fest. IGN featured 24 minutes of gameplay coinciding with the first demo release in January and then featured a trailer on their YouTube channel in May which racked up 450K views. Both of these demo releases resulted in a big spike in wishlist additions.

Undusted: Letters from the Past

Estimated wishlists: 81K
Release date: October 12, 2025
Steam page created: 17 months ago
Demo info: Released May 16, 2024 / 126 reviews / 95% positive

Undusted: Letters from the Past is a casual game in which you clean and restore dirty items. What is her story as she returns to a long-neglected house? Enjoy the satisfying audiovisuals featuring sensually designed sounds and graphics.

• The cleaning sim microgenre has taken many forms. There’s job simulators like Crime Scene Cleaner (11,446 reviews) and the meditative PowerWash Simulator (36,480 reviews), there’s absurd gore cleanup games like Viscera Cleanup (10,075 reviews) and recently announced Kaiju Cleanup, and there’s cozy organizing games like Unpacking (21,003 reviews) and recently released Whisper of the House (982 reviews).

• Undusted is situated within a subcategory of object cleaning/repair games that includes Trash Goblin (886 reviews) along with Assemble with Care (4,215 reviews). The core appeal of these games is in the cozy ASMR-feel of the cleaning/repair mechanics. In Undusted you use brushes, sponges and cloths to wipe away grime and reach a required threshold on a progress bar. The game is broken up into chapters with each one revealing more about the main character’s relationship with her deceased mother. This focused and tactile gameplay paired with a heartfelt narrative is a proven formula within cozy games.

• The game was announced in Wholesome Direct 2024 with a demo released on May 16, 2024 (126 reviews at 96% positive). It was developed by Seoul-based 5minlab Corp who made the PVP action brawler SMASH LEGENDS (2,815 reviews). 5minlab was acquired by Krafton, owner of the studios behind PUBG (2.6M reviews) and Subnautica (294K reviews), in 2022 for $19.9M. While the team had the backing of a big company, the game still represents a format that’s replicable and approachable for other self-funded indie teams setting out to make cozy games.

BALL x PIT

Estimated wishlists: 251K
Release date: October 14, 2025
Steam page created: 39 months ago
Demo info: Released June 6, 2025 / 1,483 reviews / 96% positive

BALL x PIT is a brick-breaking, ball-fusing, base-building survival roguelite. Batter hordes of enemies with ricocheting balls and gather the riches of the pit to expand your homestead, generate resources and recruit unique heroes.

• At first glance BALL x PIT looks like an ad for one of those mobile games that doesn’t actually exist. It almost feels like a pixel art version of the spoof game YEAH! YOU WANT “THOSE GAMES,” RIGHT?… (1,177 reviews). This is probably in part due to its top down vertical runner format that’s seen in hit mobile games like Count Masters: Crowd Runner 3D or Tall Man Run. But look just beyond the surface and it becomes clear that BALL x PIT is an impressive fusion of deep gameplay systems and proven subgenre tropes. It combines the bullet heaven chaos of Vampire Survivors with the retro physics of the 1976 arcade game Breakout and the action/base-building core loop that worked especially well in games like Cult of the Lamb (52,334 reviews) and Loop Hero (15,564 reviews)

• Devolver Digital, famed publisher behind BALL x PIT, showcased a promo video during Summer Game Fest 2025 that can be seen on their YouTube channel that highlights the goofy origins of the game. The game was developed by a core team of 7 led by Kenny Sun, creator of the roguelite platformer Mr. Sun’s Hatbox (380 reviews) and “circular” platformer Circa Infinity (230 reviews).

• The demo has performed exceptionally well on Steam reaching 1,481 reviews at 96% positive. One review exclaims: “This game proves anything can be turned into a rougelite, and with the right execution, will be an absolute gem of a game!”

• The game builds upon the long proven breakout-style physics gameplay following a similar formula of as other physics-based roguelike/lite games like Peglin (9,488 reviews), Dungeon Clawler (1,733 reviews), and Ballionaire (1,903 reviews). This approach can be a winning one as Philomena Schwab, co-creator of Dungeon Clawler, explains in her recent interview with Jonas Tyroller (I highlighted last week, but it’s worth repeating):

• “Yeah, that’s also something Gavin [Eisenbeisz], the Choo-Choo Charles developer, talked about a lot—combining things that are already proven—but they don’t have to be proven in games particularly, right? They can be proven things from other media. They can be proven in the real world to some capacity. So, I feel like using claw machines is kind of that route. You’re taking something that has been proven to work well in the real world and you port part of it to a game. And then you combine it with a genre that’s already working well.”

Notable Stragglers

These games are launching with estimated wishlists lower than the desired threshold of 10K. Why did they fail to break through before launch and what can we learn from them?

Luminastadt

Estimated wishlists: 216
Release date: October 15, 2025
Steam page created: 18 months ago
Demo info: Released March 29, 2025 / No available review data, demo store page was taken down by the developers

It is a non-objective sandbox builder. Build in a procedurally generated world. No management, no combat, no goals, no objectives, no points.

• The game is described as “a non-objective sandbox builder” with “no management, no combat, no goals, no objectives, no points.” I don’t think that listing all the things your game is lacking is a strong positioning strategy. Instead, focus on the core actions players take in your game and highlight why they’re appealing. You want to drawn potential players in so they come away from reading your description thinking “that sounds like I game I might want to play, I’d like to learn more”.

• If you set out to make a voxel-based sandbox game, you’re inevitably going to be compared to Minecraft. In order to breakthrough, you must answer the question: why should I play this instead of Minecraft? The answer to this question needs to grab potential players at first glance. Some games have found success in drawing inspiration from Minecraft: Trove (42,213 reviews) features epic co-op combat, Creativerse (1,341 reviews) attempted to make building more accessible with sharable blueprints, and Boundless (1,604 reviews) brings you to space.

• Luminastadt developer Markus Korda released a demo for the game on March 26, 2025 but, according to SteamDB, it received little attention peaking at just 1 concurrent player. There are no videos about the game on YouTube even from smaller creators.

• The developer has previously released seven PS1-style psychological horror / walking simulator games since July of last year. None of them have received more than 10 reviews.

Dead Oil

Estimated wishlists: 2.2K
Release date: October 16, 2025
Steam page created: 6 months ago
Demo info: Released May 26, 2025 / No available review data, demo store page was taken down by the developers

Defend your armored rig against ruthless raiders in this intense roguelike survival driller. Extract precious Oil, scavenge resources, and upgrade your rig. Is there enough time to drill a little deeper and reinforce your rig before the raiders launch their next attack?

• The trailer for Dead Oil clearly communicates a Dome Keeper-inspired core gameplay loop: drill for resources to upgrade your truck so you can defeat increasingly more powerful enemies.

• The demo was showcased by popular roguelike and strategy game YouTubers including Idle cub (35K views) and Real Civil Engineer (363K views), but those views haven’t converted to especially strong wishlist numbers. It seems unlikely that the game will reach the popular upcoming tab on the front page of Steam before launch.

• The Mad Max and Moebius-inspired art style is appealing, but the game’s concept feels a little flimsy to me. Why are these eighteen-wheelers drilling for oil? One YouTube comment also mentions the odd left-facing perspective saying: “sidescroller that goes from right to left somehow feels wrong :D”.

• The drilling portion of the game seems visually disconnected from the driving and the underground environments look flat compared to the red desert roads above. The thing that Dome Keeper really nails with the drilling mechanic is that it feels exploratory. You’re digging this vast underground world right below your feet unsure what you’ll encounter next. Drilling in Dead Oil doesn’t look as mysterious or exploratory. Feed The Deep (440 reviews) is an example of another game that follows the Dome Keeper format, but notches up the mystery factor quite a bit. It was made by Luke Muscat, who also made Fruit Ninja and Jetpack Joyride and has a modest following on YouTube, but it still failed to surpass 500 reviews. I’m not sure this bodes well for Dead Oil.

This Is No Cave

Estimated wishlists: 7.9K
Release date: October 16, 2025
Steam page created: 19 months ago
Demo info: Released October 13, 2024 / 13 reviews / 92% positive

A one-click parkour game in space. Zoom through intricate levels using your suit’s thrusters and grapple hook, all while evading colossal alien worms and racing against the clock.

• The 2D precision/parkour platformer is an extremely difficult genre to find success in. Even recent release Bionic Bay (390 reviews), which had accrued 60K wishlists and received a ton of hype on Reddit and X leading up to launch, failed to surpass 500 reviews. I would imagine this was far below publisher Kepler Interactive’s expectations. Upcoming “one-click parkour” game This Is No Cave is launching with 7.9K wishlists by comparison.

• The demo for the game has been out since October 2024 and has just 13 reviews. One review highlights some problems with the art style saying: “lack of visual clarity. the rocks blend right into the background, making it hard to see exactly what’s on the screen at any given moment.” This is as much a gameplay problem as it is a marketing problem. For a game to have even a moderate chance of success in this genre, the visuals need to really pop. Jump King (4,933 reviews) is a good example of how to do this well. The environments are lush and varied and even though the character is relatively small on the screen, it’s clear that he’s a knight setting out an impossible journey to “struggle upwards in search of the Smoking Hot Babe of legend”.

• This is No Cave embraces a dark and moody pixel art style that looks cohesive, but is a little hard to read at a glance. The Steam page prompts the player to “immerse yourself in hand-drawn landscapes, from the eerie depths of subterranean caves to the vibrant expanse of a lush jungle, both teeming with alien life.” The developers should certainly be proud of their hand-drawn pixel art environments, but in a fast-paced and difficult parkour game, I’m not sure many players will stop to smell the roses.

Thanks for reading and have a great week.

This week I examine the risk and reward of challenging established genre norms, look at how creating a game based on real-world concepts can boost appeal, and dive into the emerging opportunity around taking a hardcore genre and making it cozy.

Challenging genre norms

Since Steam introduced tags in 2014, they have become a key feature for game discoverability among players and developers alike. Tags on Steam are used to specify a game’s genre including top level categories like Adventure, RPG, and Simulation along with more specific categories like Battle Royale, City Builder, and Roguelike. They’re also used to identify even more specific subgenres like Creature Collector, Looter Shooter, and Souls-like as well as themes and moods as wide ranging as Dinosaurs, Noir, and Relaxing.

Periodically, Steam creates new tags to capture emerging categories that have enough interest and attention behind them, but don’t fit within existing tags. Last year they added the tags Dice, Boomer Shooter, Dwarf, and Elf. All in all, there are over 450 tags on the platform. With all those tags available, players, and sometimes developers, can mis-tag a game. As Steam explained shortly after they first launched the feature:

Tags can be a good indicator of when there is a mismatch between how you perceive your game, and how your game is perceived by customers.

Getting your tags right is simple, but important. Not only do tags give players a sense of what they can expect from your game, they’re also used by Steam’s recommendation algorithm all across the platform. One of those places is the “More like this” carousel, which can drive significant traffic to your game’s page. From Steam when this feature first launched in 2014:

If you visit a product page for a game on Steam, you’ll notice a section just above the reviews called “More like this”. With the addition of tags, we can better figure out which games are most closely related thematically and stylistically. As a result, the amount of traffic through the ‘More like this” section of the product page has tripled, which indicates to us that customers are finding those suggestions much more relevant.

Now, imagine you’re an indie developer (this shouldn’t be too hard for you, my dear reader). You’ve been hard at work on your latest game and you’re ready to start marketing it. First step: a store page on Steam. You upload your capsule art, put the finishing touches on your description, and add some tags that seem right for the kind of game you’re making. You submit your page for review. A few days later, Steam approves it and it’s live! Hooray, time to share it with the world.

You visit your page and scroll to the “More like this” section, curious to see what other games the Steam algorithm is recommending to shoppers. You see the following:

• The latest game in a 20-year-old AAA franchise that was launched exclusively on PlayStation 5 and sold 5.1 million copies within its first week.

• A remake of a game from 1997 which was voted “Best Game Ever” by users of GameFAQs in 2004 and 2005.

• A remaster collection for a franchise that includes the world’s most recognizable characters owned by one of the longest-running and most successful media companies.

• A game based on a book and subsequent movie franchise that is the 8th highest grossing media franchise of all time at $34.7B, sitting just above the Marvel Cinematic Universe at $34.3B.

Talk about stiff competition.

Unless you’re working on the latest AAA action adventure game set in a fantasy world, your “More like this” carousel should definitely not look like this. If it does, it’s a sign of one of the following:

1. Your tags aren’t specific enough

2. Your game isn’t specific enough

The former is easy to fix: just think about the games that are most similar to yours and copy their tags. The latter can signal a deeper problem.

The screenshot above is from the Steam page for upcoming title Dreams of Another (releasing October 9th with 19K wishlists). A post on the PlayStation blog by Baiyon, the Creative Director of Q-Games and developer of Dreams of Another, describes the game saying:

[Dreams of Another is a] philosophical and allegorical gaming experience where shooting creates rather than destroys.

Reading this description, the first comparable games that come to mind are certainly not the big budget hits like God of War, Final Fantasy, Kingdom Hearts, or Hogwarts Legacy. But come to think of it, there really aren’t many games that are “more like” Dreams of Another, and that seems to be by design. Baiyon’s description continues:

Piece together the interwoven stories in this unconventional game that challenges common tropes and invites players to understand not just the game, but their own life in a whole new light.

“Challenging common tropes” is an honorable effort, but doing so presents you with an even greater challenge: properly positioning your game on Steam. Paradoxically, the less similar your game is to other games on the market, the harder it can be to market your game. It can be especially difficult to understand when you’ve crossed the threshold between “unique enough to stand out” and “so esoteric that you fail to break through”. If you’re going to make something intentionally unconventional, it’s worth thinking carefully about how potential players will discover your game. The least you can do is optimize your “More like this” results on Steam.

Taking inspiration from the real world

Basing a game around a theme or common object from the real world can be a good strategy for boosting appeal. A recent example of this can be seen with the roguelike claw machine deckbuilder Dungeon Clawler (2,786 total reviews). The team, known as Stray Fawn, developed a prototype for the game on the side while working on their city builder The Wandering Village (6,338 total reviews). They were inspired by the few roguelike deckbuilders at the time that incorporated physics-based gameplay like Peglin (15,416 total reviews). After a trip to Japan where the team spent hours playing claw machine games in arcades they revisited the prototype and expanded it into a full release. Studio head Philomena Schwab explains why they set out to make a game based on a claw machine in an excellent interview with Jonas Tyroller:

Yeah, that’s also something Gavin [Eisenbeisz], the Choo-Choo Charles developer, talked about a lot—combining things that are already proven—but they don’t have to be proven in games particularly, right? They can be proven things from other media. They can be proven in the real world to some capacity. So, I feel like using claw machines is kind of that route. You’re taking something that has been proven to work well in the real world and you port part of it to a game. And then you combine it with a genre that’s already working well.

Balatro developer Localthunk has similar reasoning as to why he chose to build his game around known poker mechanics. In an interview on Game Developer he explains:

“I think there’s a contingent of people more willing to interface with a game if it’s talking about blinds, discards, and all these [poker] words,” said LocalThunk. “It was like an onboarding tool, a coat of paint to make this seem approachable for a particular audience.”

The so-called dicebuilder is an emerging microgenre that similarly takes inspiration from the real world. In this case…dice. Upcoming roguelike dicebuilder Dicealot (releasing October 8th with 18K wishlists) deploys a CRT TV video poker art style reminiscent of Balatro, but is structured more like a dungeon crawler with Farkle-inspired combat. Retromation, a popular roguelike YouTuber, played the demo during Steam Next Fest in October last year and opened his video saying “it seems to be a mix between Balatro and Farkle”. Retromation’s ability to describe the core appeal of the game in one sentence is a testament to thoughtful design and positioning by Dicealot developer goodviewgames.

See also: Other dice games Slice & Dice, Dicey Dunegons, Dice & Fold, Astrea, SpellRogue, Circadian Dice, One Deck Dungeon, Dice Legacy, Roll, and DICEOMANCER.

Take a hardcore genre and make it cozy

As Chris Zukowski has covered on his blog numerous times, the types of games that perform best on Steam are of the “crafty buildy strategy simulation” variant. Players on Steam generally prefer games with deep interconnected systems and endless hours of emergent gameplay. Factorio (109,186 total reviews) is a perfect example of this. Despite never going on sale it continues to sell extremely well because it hits that crafty-buildy sweet spot that PC gamers love.

Upcoming game Little Rocket Lab (releasing October 7th with 49K wishlists) presents us with a compelling strategy for differentiation within this market: going cozy. You can guess exactly what you’re getting just based on the name of the game: “little” denotes cozy and “rocket lab” brings to mind deep systemic automation mechanics like those found in Dyson Sphere Program (23,363 total reviews).

You play as Morgan, an aspiring engineer headed home to complete your family’s dream project - a rocket ship! Finding home not quite how she left it, Morgan will need to research and build clever contraptions and sprawling factories to help the locals. From simple drills and furnaces to complex assemblers, cranes and miles of conveyor belts, you’ll convert local resources into useful materials and bring industry back to sleepy St. Ambroise.

As this description from the Steam page for Little Rocket Lab illustrates, going cozy isn’t about simplifying or dumbing down a game for a more casual audience. Rather, it’s about re-theming gameplay systems that have already been proven to work. The Steam page for Factorio and Little Rocket Lab share the following terms:

• automation

• belts

• complexity

• crafting

• factories

• industry

• machines

• mechanical

• mining

• research

• resources

• robots

This is no accident. Teenage Astronauts, the developers of Little Rocket Lab, clearly understand how to make their game appealing to fans of other games in their chosen genre. Embrace genre tropes and players will connect the dots themselves.

Finally, let’s look at the three games I covered (behind the paywall) a month ago and see if their wishlists ended up converting to strong sales figures within the first month of release:

• Asteroid base-builder by popular YouTuber kurzgesagt Star Birds had an estimated 338K wishlists before launching into early access on September 10, 2025. It was priced at $19.99 and reached 1,437 reviews with a review score of 93% positive in the first month. The game has an estimated gross revenue of $1.3M. My evaluation: a definitive hit.

• Incremental train-builder Trainatic had an estimated 26K wishlists before launching on September 8, 2025. It was priced at $5.99 and reached 524 reviews with a review score of 91% positive in the first month. The game has an estimated gross revenue of $205K. My evaluation: a definitive success.

• Meme-inspired point and click The Trolley Solution had an estimated 39K wishlists before launching on September 12, 2025. It was priced at $9.99 and reached 322 reviews with a review score of 80% positive in the first month. The game has an estimated gross revenue of $73K. My evaluation: a moderate success.

Thanks for reading and have a great week.

This week I examine a seven-year development timeline, how artistic uniqueness and commercialization conflict, and why a game’s name affects marketability.

Let’s get into it…

Crossing the great filter of indie game development

Nukefist, the two person team behind the upcoming Kingdom Hearts-inspired hack & slash, Genokids (releasing October 2nd with 55K est. wishlists), are nothing if not persistent. Their press release details that they started development in 2018/19. A year and a half later they launched a kickstarter campaign that ultimately failed to reach its goal of $35K. They continued to work on the game while contributing to a “fantasy adventure about an aspiring witch” called Mika and The Witch’s Mountain, which was co-developed with Chibig, the team behind Summer in Mara, and was released earlier this year with an estimated gross revenue of $385K. Nukefist then ran an entirely new Kickstarter campaign for Genokids in April 2023 to fund the completion of the game with their goal set again at $35K. This campaign exceeded their expectations bringing in $100K with over 1,500 backers. The additional funds allowed them to reach all of their stretch goals including adding voice acting and a Nintendo Switch version.

If Genokids performs well on Steam, it’ll be a storybook ending to a classically indie tale. Two friends follow their dreams and make the game they always wanted to against all odds. But this approach doesn’t typically turn out so well for most indies. As I covered in Six months or bust, long development timelines are incredibly risky. As your timeline grows, so do your costs. With more time comes increased pressure for outsized returns. And most games just don’t make enough money to cover 7 years of costs, even with Kickstarter funds in the bank. Between 2020 and 2023 only 50% of games released on Steam surpassed $500 in estimated gross revenue. In 2024, just 32% grossed over $500. As new indie developers continue to enter the market, I suspect that number will continue to shrink.

Spending 7 years working on one game sounds like an absolute nightmare to me. But maybe it’s a magic number of sorts. The 7 year threshold could be akin to The Great Filter, the hypothesized bottleneck in astrophysics that few civilizations clear before becoming spacefaring, and the explanation for why we haven’t come into contact with other intelligent life. Few can pass through The Great Filter.

There must be something driving Nukefist’s persistence. I would suspect it’s a deep appreciation for the hack & slash genre. But deep appreciation can only motivate you for so long. Not even indie darling Eric Barone spent 7 years working on his passion project turned megahit Stardew Valley. Ask the average indie developer why they make the games they do and they’re most likely to respond with one of the following: “I just want to make the game I would want to play” or “I couldn’t find the game I wanted, so I had to make it myself” or “I love game X and game Y, and wanted to see what would happen if you combine them”.

A recent YouTube video uploaded by Nukefist highlights that they fall into a couple of these camps, it’s titled: “No new Kingdom Hearts game in years so I made my own.” This video was just 48 seconds of gameplay and reached 64K views. The top comment reads:

So we’re combining KH [Kingdom Hearts] and DMC [Devil May Cry]? I absolutely get it. It’s a working formula. And I’m all here for it.

As I discussed in last week’s post about the slot machine roguelite CloverPit, it can sometimes be a winning strategy to be unabashedly direct about your influences. This works especially well if you nail the combination. It’s got to be clear and obvious.

Commercialization vs artistic uniqueness

Éalú (releasing October 2nd with 11K est. wishlists) doesn’t appear to be a game made with commercial appeal in mind. It’s a point and click puzzle game, a genre that tends to have little appeal among streamers. It doesn’t have a demo. And the development process seems particularly laborious. The game is constructed entirely of real life props captured in stop motion. The Steam page explains:

Éalú is a true stop-motion game. Every animation was captured via photography frame-by-frame using real sets, hand-crafted props, and a physical wooden mouse. Over 512 video clips were painstakingly made by a single animator — mostly in a garden shed — and brought to life in Unity by one developer carefully ensuring that each movement flowed into the next.

Point and click puzzle games tend to have a hard time breaking through on Steam, but FMV games are among some of the best sellers. The genre has a median gross revenue of $4,200 compared to puzzle games with $680. It’s also far from oversaturated. There are 820 FMV games on Steam compared to 28K puzzle games. If you were to set out to make a market-informed FMV game you’d probably be inclined to make a dating sim like Love Is All Around, a detective game like The Operator or Her Story, or a horror game like recently released Dead Reset. 51% of FMV games are mystery games, 42% are story rich, 20% of them are horror, 19% are dating sims, and 12% are NSFW.

Most FMV games feature characters with backstories and developed arcs. Beyond the Bark, the team behind Éalú, instead set out to make an FMV game featuring a wooden toy mouse. While the game is tagged “Story Rich”, the story is left obscure according to the trailer. Rather than trying to fit within a proven framework for the genre, Beyond the Bark prioritize artistic uniqueness. As the Steam page explains, the game is purely fueled by passion:

Éalú was made with no budget & no crowdfunding. Just 4 people passionate about the project.

The team is “an animation, puppetry, production design and theatrical fabrication company based in Limerick.” Having come from “the arts” myself, I understand the impulse to traverse mediums. When I first started to make games, a few colleagues warned me that the history of the video games industry is littered with failed projects by people coming in wide-eyed from other mediums (movies, visual art, theater, animation, music, etc.)

Despite all this, Éalú has managed to reach 11K wishlists. Why? Artistic uniqueness can be a very strong hook in and of itself. But it doesn’t guarantee good reviews and sales. You still have to consider your genre conventions carefully. In the case of puzzle games, players can often bounce off of them rather quickly. A PC Gamer article previewing the game warns:

Speaking as a dumbass, it did not take long until the puzzles in the labyrinth really started to stump me

Some of the best selling puzzle games either have a crude art style, but are deeply systemic like Baba Is You and Stephen’s Sausage Roll. Or are beautifully vast and exploratory like The Witness or The Talos Principle. While aesthetically unique, Éalú is confined rather than vast, and the puzzles seem restrictive rather than deep.

What’s in a name?

If you’re making a roguelike or idle game, there are a few niche but coveted YouTubers who can send your wishlist numbers soaring. Among these are Haelian, Wanderbots, ImCade, DangerouslyFunny, InterdotGif, Sifd, and Idle cub. All YouTubers who have played the upcoming idler/incremental game IDLE BOSS RUSH (releasing September 29th with 29K est. wishlists). More recently, breaking through the growing inboxes of even these niche YouTubers has become more difficult. Wanderbot explains in a recent feature on Push to Talk:

“My pitches per day have gone up massively since about 2019 or so,” he said in an email exchange. “Pre-2020, I felt great if I could find 1-2 new games per week that fit my interests/niche/bare minimum requirements for quality, which worked fine when I was still doing Let’s Plays. Post-2020, the sheer quantity of new releases is so high that I can only cover roughly 10-25% of games that fit those same criteria, and only as a one-off impressions video rather than a full playthrough.”

One thing that has changed dramatically in recent years is the popularity of “outreach lists” for content creators. Because Wanderbot has over half a million subscribers, his contact info is automatically included on many outreach lists.

[…]

Ultimately, the sheer number of new games has come to feel like a burden, even for someone like Wanderbot who is explicitly looking for new games to play and feature: “To be honest, I’m not really excited for how much the release numbers are scaling up for this year and going into the future,” he says. “The systems we have available just aren’t built for this kind of volume.”

So how do you break through? IDLE BOSS RUSH presents us with one possible strategy: a clear and obvious name that immediately positions your game within a genre. I don’t even have to look at the game description to understand what it is. I like the naming formula here of [GENRE] [CONCEPT]. This is something that games in the simulator genre have been doing for a while. Chris Zukowski has written about the importance of a clear name saying:

On Steam I think the most important thing a name does is give people the “vibe” of your genre and theme at a glance. Shoppers spend seconds scanning lists of games that are recommended to them. If they see a game that fits their favorite genre, they will click to read more.

Valve gives you just a few places where you can hint at your genre, so you need to be smart about it. Use a combination of Capsule (aka thumbnail), game title, and tags to get your genre across in those long lists of games.

Irid Games, the team behind IDLE BOSS RUSH, seems to have, at least temporarily, pivoted away from working on their previous title, an early access roguelike-inspired tactics game called Dethroned. The game has reached just $10K in estimated gross revenue with 25 reviews at 76% positive. I’m sure far below the team’s expectations. Dethroned suffers from both genre confusion and, compared to IDLE BOSS RUSH, an unclear name. The Steam page reads:

Lead an army of mythical creatures through a dark fantasy world. In this genre-defying mix of tactics, adventure, and more, you’ll level up your hero, blast monsters with spells, loot and recruit. Explore an unpredictable, non-linear world, where you’ll face Dragons, Titans, Hydras, and... crabs?!

A “genre-defying mix of tactics, adventure, and more” is not specific enough. Put yourself in the shoes of a streamer or YouTuber who does niche, genre-specific let’s plays. You’re scrolling through your inbox looking for the next game to play on stream. You’re inundated with hundreds of emails per day. You see an email about a game called Dethroned and another one about a game called IDLE BOSS RUSH. Which one are you more likely to click?

Thanks for reading and have a great week.

This week there are 205 new releases1 on Steam. 95 are tagged as indie (46%) and 37 of those indies have released a demo (18%).

• >10K wishlists: 16 indie, 13 with demo (81%)

• 1K-10K wishlists: 16 indie, 13 with demo (81%)

• <1,000 wishlists: 63 indie, 11 with demo (17%)

This week I’m looking at a slot machine roguelite, an ultra-fast paced dungeon runner, and a semi-autobiographical life sim. Let’s get into it…

CloverPit

Estimated wishlists: 490K

Release date: September 26, 2025
Steam page created: 11 months ago
Demo info: Released April 10, 2025 / No available review data, demo store page was taken down by the developers

A rogue-lite slot machine nightmare. Gamble for your life in a never-ending debt simulator!

Twitch streamer Northernlion said in his first video featuring the CloverPit demo: “I guess it’s not even out yet, but still, the demo is better than 99% of the games I’ve ever played.” In a follow up video titled Can a demo be GOTY? he said “When the mechanics are good, it doesn’t matter that it’s a demo.” Since the game was announced in April, it has reached an estimated 490K wishlists.

I’ll admit, when I first saw the announcement for CloverPit in April, I had a feeling that it was a bit too on the nose, and maybe a little cloying. The developers, a duo called Panik Arcade, describe the game as “the demonic lovechild of Balatro & Buckshot Roulette.” At the time, it was common to see other indie developers lamenting about the coming onslaught of Balatro clones after it sold millions of copies. But, my first impressions were clearly wrong. The game’s unabashedly direct Balatro-like gambling concept seems to be what has caused it to circulate so widely. CloverPit demonstrates that players want more games like the other ones they love, not less.

It’s useful to look at CloverPit through the framework of the fast follow, a term Chris Zukowski uses to describe games that attempt to draw upon the hype of another recent hit game. Zukowski says:

Sometimes a game becomes a viral hit. It is a magical thing, it is a rare thing, and amazing to watch. A fast follow is a quickly-produced follow-up game made by a competitor to try and capture the ambient success of that viral hit game. A fast-follow is not a clone, but shares about 70% of the same DNA of that hit game.

The CloverPit demo was released 12 months after Buckshot Roulette and 18 months after Balatro. It’s not necessarily the fastest of fast-follows, games like Liar’s Bar quickly released within 6 months, but the long tail success of both games meant CloverPit could still tap into the lingering hype many months later.

CloverPit is connected to a whole range of slot machine-inspired roguelike games released since Luck Be a Landlord in 2021, which Balatro developer Localthunk described as one of his main inspirations. Among these are the creature collector variant Cat God Ranch (1.6K reviews) which places a cute, artistic veneer on top of the core slot machine mechanics, obfuscating them in some way. CloverPit, instead, wholly embraces the slot machine. The core game loop involves the player pulling a lever on a literal slot machine to make (fake) money and meet a threshold or else plummet to their death into the pit below.

CloverPit has successfully leaned into the deviousness of gambling, with its tongue in cheek description explaining “gamble for your life in a never-ending debt simulator!” In contrast, Balatro developer Localthunk has taken great care to disconnect his game from any association with gambling saying “I hate the thought of Balatro becoming a true gambling game”. CloverPit releases amidst a growing iGaming industry as popular sports betting apps FanDuel and DraftKings have released virtual casino apps with slot machine-style gambling games in attempts to expand beyond sports.

Not every player on Steam is clamoring for the latest gambling-inspired roguelike, but mass appeal shouldn’t concern you, as describes in his recent post: “when you try to build something for everyone, you build something for no one.”

The median game on Steam sells 500 copies. The median SaaS product never breaks $10K MRR. They die not because they're bad, but because they're forgettable. They tried so hard not to offend anyone that they failed to delight anyone.

Meanwhile, products with sharp edges - products that actively repel certain users - create something more valuable than broad appeal: they create identity.

See also: GameDiscoverCo covered how the game reached 100K wishlists in one week back in April, other relevant “I’m trapped in a room” games include Inscryption, Buckshot Roulette, Five Nights at Freddy’s, Clickolding, Flathead, and upcoming games PVKK, Death In Your Dice, and Arsonate

Bloodthief

Estimated wishlists: 116K

Release date: September 22, 2025
Steam page created: 26 months ago
Demo info: April 16, 2024 / 555 reviews / 96% positive

Bloodthief is an ultra-fast melee dungeon-runner where you use momentum to parkour through hazardous dungeons and brutally slash through enemies. Speed-run through haunted dungeons and castles and learn what dark secrets lie beneath.

Should you be making devlogs? If you were to ask Bloodthief developer Blargis, he’d probably say yes. Over the past 2 years Blargis has posted 13 devlogs on YouTube, most of them between 15 to 20 minutes long, with his most popular video reaching 2.2M views and 83K likes. His steady growth in wishlists can be directly attributed to the success of his devlogs.

Blargis, who has a day job as a software developer, has been working on Bloodthief part time by himself since at least July 2023. He describes the game as inspired by “Neon White, Ghostrunner, ULTRAKILL, and of course, Quake.” The demo has reached 548 reviews with 96% a positive rating. The game was playtested throughout the very public development process with tight collaboration with players via a discord with over 7000 members.

Blargis took advantage of the often overlooked Steam playtest feature starting early in development in November 2023. Playtests on Steam are similar to demos in that they allow players to try out an early version of the game, but they’re much lower stakes as players expect to encounter bugs and little kinks in the game design here and there. Blargis created a tight marketing funnel with his devlogs serving as a way of getting people interested in the game enough to ultimately play the playtest, and later, the demo, and get involved in the community.

Choo-Choo Charles and CUFFBUST developer Gavin Eisenbeisz has good advice when it comes to creating devlogs. As he explains, your audience is not other game developers it’s your players. Eisenbeisz‘s devlogs for Choo-Choo Charles gained him over 200K wishlists. Many developers who set out to make devlogs end up making something halfway between a technical deep dive and tutorial instead of an entertaining video highlighting what’s fun about the game. Even some of the more popular game dev YouTubers make this mistake. David Wehle, developer of the upcoming farming sim horror game We Harvest Shadows (est. 264K wishlists), commented on Eisenbeisz’s devlog video saying:

This might be literally the best indie marketing video on YouTube, thanks so much Gavin. Pretty sure I mixed my audiences on my channel and now all my videos stagnate and get stuck. Not sure what to do honestly.

If you’re interested in making devlogs, remember your audience is your potential players, not other developers. Follow the format successfully and they can be a great way to market your game and grow a community. I’m looking forward to seeing if the millions of views that Blargis racked up for the Bloodthief devlogs convert to strong sales figures over the next few weeks.

Consume Me

Estimated wishlists: 38K

Release date: September 25, 2025
Steam page created: months ago
Demo: Released May 29, 2025 / 156 reviews / 99% positive

did you feel stupid, fat, lazy, and ugly in high school? well i did...but at least i made a life-simulation RPG about it!

In many ways, the history of computer games is a history of simulation games. Since Microsoft Flight Sim first released in 1982, thousands of games have attempted to mimic reality in ways that are fun and engaging. The life sim is a variant made popular by Will Wright’s The Sims franchise, but which originated with games like Little Computer People (1985) and Princess Maker (1991). More recent examples like Long Live the Queen extend the spreadsheet-like gameplay seen in Princess Maker where the core mechanics revolve around managing an often overwhelming list of different stats and resources.

Consume Me combines gameplay systems typical of life sim games with WarioWare style mini games and a “darkly funny coming-of-age story”. The player must juggle a growing list of daily tasks while carefully balancing main character Jenny’s diet and hunger levels to get her through her final year of high school. The game was developed by a team of 4 and began as a prototype made in 2018 by artist Jenny Jiao Hsia at NYU Game Center in a class taught by Bennett Foddy of Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy fame.

It was later presented as a part of an exhibition titled Videogames: Design/Play/Disrupt at V&A Dundee, a museum in Dundee, Scotland. In 2019, the team received funding from Kowloon Knights, an organization that provides development money in exchange for a revenue cut, but doesn’t act as a publisher in the traditional sense as they don’t handle marketing and distribution. Kowloon Knights have supported projects with budgets that range from $100K to $10M including Sifu, Hell Clock, and Keep Driving.

Creator and core team member Jenny Jiao Hsia has over 11K followers on Instagram and regularly posted videos throughout development promoting the game that often reached a few hundred likes. The game was covered by The Guardian in August shortly after the demo was released on Steam. It has already been a critical darling far before launch, it was the recipient of the Seumas McNally Grand Prize and the Nuovo Award at the Independent Games Festival at GDC earlier this year.

It will be interesting to see if Consume Me can find commercial success within its niche as it’s an example of a game that doesn’t fully embrace established genre conventions. It attempts to straddle the line between the systemic depth of the life sim genre, the chaotic playfulness of minigame-driven games, and narrative games with a social message. You could draw similarities to recent release to a T, which was developed by Keita Takahashi, creator of Katamari Damacy, and based on the numbers, it seems likely that the game will perform similarly. Both games reached wishlist numbers moderately above the typical discoverability threshold of 10K. to a T was well reviewed, but failed to break through selling just an estimated 4,700 copies on Steam. Consume Me could ultimately perform better among console players if it’s eventually ported to the Switch 2. Narrative driven games sometimes find a wider audience on Switch compared to Steam.

Thanks for reading and have a great week.

And why did Universal, the mightiest studio of all, pass on Star Wars, a decision that just may cost them, when all the sequels and spinoffs and toy money and book money and video-game money are totaled, over a billion dollars? Because nobody, nobody—not now, not ever—knows the least goddam thing about what is or isn’t going to work at the box office.

But clearly Goldman himself knew a thing or two about writing hits. His 17 films grossed a total $655 million worldwide and he racked up 11 awards and 15 nominations including 2 Oscars and 3 Golden Globes.

Even if we admit that some people know something about success, some still view the very attempt to understand the market as counterproductive to real, raw creativity. The market is the apple in the Garden of Eden of creativity. Take one bite and you’ll turn into one of those slithering suits who is forever cursed to design by committee. And for indies who pride themselves on authentic artistic expression, there’s nothing worse than coming across as a calculating suit. In an interview on IGN, game director of Metaphor: ReFantazio and the Persona games, Katsura Hashino said:

“I feel like if you have these super highly polished games that look like they were designed by a bunch of people in a CEO boardroom, that doesn’t really excite me — it doesn’t really interest me”, he admits, bluntly. “But when I see these sorts of games [which reveal a little about the people that made them], it really fills me with the motivation to keep developing,” he says. “That these artists, these creatives, had something they really wanted to say is where I get all of my inspiration from, and the drive to continue to be creative myself.”

I learned as much when my postmortem, Why Our Game Flopped, circulated among a group of indie developers on X earlier this year. Many posters were eager to point out that it was my very attempt at market analysis that was the cause of my commercial failure. One reply said: “This is how you know you're going to fail. Just make a good game and stop worrying about it.” Their advice was: just dream big.

I think they’re dead wrong here. Not “worrying about it” is avoidant and risky. I’d rather take Ambrook founder Mackenzie Burnett’s advice and reframe worry as de-risking. We should use market analysis to our advantage, to ground our wildest dreams.

Onto the Wishlist Rundown for this week…

No, I'm not a Human

Estimated wishlists: 715K

Release date: September 15, 2025
Steam page created: 12 months ago
Demo info: Released June 8, 2025 / 956 reviews / 98% positive

WARNING. Stay inside. Lock your doors. Close the blinds. Only let humans in. Eliminate all Visitors. An anxiety horror about paranoia in the End of Times.

No, I’m not a Human feels like a perfect encapsulation of what players are looking for from shorter indie horror games on Steam. An early version of the game was released in August 2024 as a part of the the horror game anthology Violent Horror Stories. YouTuber Jacksepticeye got a hold of it a few months later and called it “one of the best new horror games.” The game clearly had strong appeal even in its early state.

It was signed by prolific bizzarro horror-ish games publisher CRITICAL REFLEX (publisher of Buckshot Roulette) sometime around December 2024. At the time it had amassed around 200K wishlists. The Steam page for the full game had been live for only a couple months. Crazy numbers! The developers, Trioskaz, released an updated demo in June coinciding with Steam Next Fest and it continued to gain visibility from there.

The core gameplay loop of No, I’m Not a Human is reminiscent of inspection games like Papers Please or Quarantine Zone: The Last Check and spot-the-difference or anomaly games like The Cabin Factory. You chat with visitors seeking shelter through the peephole at your front door and choose whether or not to let them in. The characters are creepy looking and the dialogue is just vague enough to keep you wondering what’s really going on outside. Screenshots of the game really pop with strong art direction causing the game to stand out immediately at a glance.

I’m sure we’ll start to see more horror games that deploy a branching, almost roguelike-flavored, run-based, narrative structure like this. It seems to be a great way to keep the all important average playtime and concurrent user metrics up in a genre that’s typically known (at least in the case of indies) for shorter games that you can finish in one sitting.

See also: Who’s at the door?, another recent door-based inspection/anomaly horror game that sold well, and the intentionally dumbed down pitch form from CRITICAL REFLEX that’s worth checking out if you’ve got a particularly weird game and need a publisher, and TROLEU (est. 47K wishlists) another game published by CRITICAL REFLEX coming out this week.

If you’re unfamiliar with how Steam follower counts are used to estimate wishlists, or just unfamiliar with the wishlist metric altogether, see these helpful breakdowns from How To Market A Game here and from GameDiscoverCo here and here.

Henry Halfhead

Estimated wishlists: 40K wishlists

Release date: September 16, 2025
Steam page created: 31 months ago
Demo info: Released but removed from Steam before launch

Meet Henry, merely half a head, yet with the peculiar ability to become any object within their reach! Discover every object’s unique abilities and cleverly combine them to take Henry through their not-so-ordinary everyday life.

Henry Halfhead is a playful sandbox game with a colorful art style reminiscent of Untitled Goose Game where you can become any object within reach and generally just wreck havoc. Players on Steam love sandbox games. Chris Zukowski of How To Market A Game has highlighted this previously saying:

These games are like marble mazes or domino tracks. The are digital Rube Goldberg machines. The point of the game is to setup a strange scenario then push play and see what happens. They typically rely on hilarious physics, jank, buggy behaviors, glitches, and explosions.

The first few seconds of the trailer for Henry Halfhead shows a sequence where the player (get ready)…becomes a chair and slides under a table, then transforms into an apple on the floor, hops onto the chair and onto the table, then rolls towards a plate, morphs into a knife and cuts the apple up into pieces only to switch back to the default “halfhead” character and devour the freshly sliced apple pieces.

And of course, a clip of this very sequence blew up on TikTok in March 2023 racking up 136K views and 1462 likes. The emergent, playful humor in these sorts of sandbox games is a key part of their appeal. Good sandbox games are, what you could call, clippable. With sandbox games, random moments of gameplay can be readily captured by players and streamers alike to post on social media.

Henry Halfhead was developed by a team of 6 over the course of 5 years. This long development timeline screams risky to me for a small indie, but it seems like the team did a good job validating the game as they went. The game started as a student project in 2020 and was later announced in the MIX Showcase in 2023 and subsequently featured in Wholesome Direct and Day of the Devs. It’s also important to point out that the game was at least in part funded by the Swiss Arts Council. The team has received at least $128,000 in grant funding over the past five years. It looks like the game has impressive systemic depth and it’s certainly not the kind of project that could be realized on a shoestring budget. Grants can be a good option for certain types of games. Let me know if you want to see a post where I deep dive into grants for games.

I’m a little surprised the game doesn’t have more wishlists than it does. We’ll keep an eye on how well it sells. 40K is well beyond the often-cited 10K wishlists you need to have a chance at wider visibility on Steam but, when you spread it out over the course of the 31 months that the Steam page has been live that’s just 1.2K wishlists per month. This pales in comparison to the other two games in this rundown which had significantly shorter development times and are launching with much higher wishlist counts with Easy Deliver Co. averaging 18.3K per month and No, I’m not a Human averaging 58K per month.

See also: Everything, the game where you can become a frog, a tiny particle, a galaxy and everything in between, and mouthful mode in Kirby and the Forgotten Land.

Easy Delivery Co.

Estimated wishlists: 203K

Release date: September 18, 2025
Steam page created: 11 months ago
Demo: Released April 24, 2025 / 1,104 reviews / 97% positive

Easy Delivery Co. is a relaxing driving game with strange secrets. Chill out, make deliveries and get to know the mysterious residents of this scenic mountain town, all while earning well below minimum wage. Play at your own pace or play in split-screen race mode with up to four players.

Looking at screenshots of Easy Delivery Co. gives you the sense that this game was destined to reach wide visibility on Steam just purely due to “the vibes”. The game features exploration and job sim-style gameplay with cute animal crossing-inspired characters set in an open world cozy mountain town all wrapped in a retro PS1 look. At the time of the demo release, an article on Vice said:

Something about Easy Delivery Co. is slightly unsettling, but I mean that in the most positive of ways. There’s something a bit off about this town. But I can’t help but soak in the vibes as I cruise down the street. The bed of my truck is loaded up with deliveries and ready to be dropped off at the earliest possible time. It’s creepy and kooky, mysterious and spooky, but most importantly, it’s also incredibly adorable.

The Steam page for the game was published in November 2024. It received its first bump in wishlists on January 19, 2025 when this clip (see embed below) was posted by the developer, Sam C, on X. It reached 173K views and 5.9K likes and brought in about 500 wishlists (rough approximation from looking at the follower graph). The game really began to take off with the launch of the demo in April 2025 which coincided with a reveal trailer posted by GameTrailers. Subsequent clips posted by the developer on X have regularly surpassed tens of thousands of views.

Easy Delivery Co. was made by solo developer Sam C. It seems to have been in development for at least a year with Reddit posts from the developer dating back to September 2024. A couple of these posts on Reddit performed relatively well reaching over 1K upvotes, but from the looks of the followers graph below they didn’t have much of an effect on wishlists. Good early validation nonetheless. The game was picked up by Oro Interactive around the time of the demo release. They’re a new publisher that puts out “catchy, creator-focused games” and has a novel operating model with their website explaining:

YOU DEVELOP. WE PUBLISH.

We act as an external "in-house" publishing branch. We know, weird right.

This basically means that you can focus on creating games and we take care of (and pay for) everything else: marketing, PR, localization, playtesting, and QA. Porting TBD on context.

On occasions, we provide project funding up to a maximum of $50,000.

As the number of games on Steam continues to grow, some creators are finding it more difficult to sift through the overwhelming number of releases. Perhaps this creator-focused publishing model will become more common. Publishers can serve as both a middle man for developers and a curator for creators.

See also: See other games published by Oro Interactive including Murky Divers and Order 13 along with upcoming games Dead Format and Roadside Research, which I mentioned in my post Six months or bust here:

Thanks for reading and have a great week.

On August 21, Team Cherry announced that its Hollow Knight sequel, Silksong, will launch on PlayStation 4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Switch, Switch 2, and PC on September 4. That blew up the schedules for a number of indie devs and publishers who had staked out a release date around that time and were now suddenly competing directly with what will likely be one of the biggest games of 2025. So, as you might expect, a lot of these devs and publishers have started announcing delays to get out of Silksong‘s way. This has become known as getting “Silksong’d” or “Silksonged.”

A Polygon article went as far as to say that the “gaming industry deserved more lead time” from Silksong developer Team Cherry. And the studio behind the delayed tactics RPG Demonschool said, “Dropping the GTA of indie games with 2 weeks notice makes everyone freak out.”

But why is everyone freaking out? Does it even make sense that CloverPit, a grungy slot machine rogue-lite with over 400K wishlists, should delay due to the release of a hand-drawn 2D metroidvania? According to data from Streamforge, the creator overlap among these two games is small.

• To date, 523 YouTubers have played Silksong and 201 have played the CloverPit demo, and only 6 played both.

• That is 1.15% of Silksong creators and 2.97% of CloverPit creators.

• And to date on Twitch, 54 streamed Silksong and 750 streamed CloverPit, and only 1 streamed both.

• That is 1.85% of Hollow Knight streamers and 0.13% of CloverPit streamers.

This isn’t the first time panic has spread among developers due to a much anticipated release date announcement. In 2023, developer Larian Studios moved the launch of Baldur’s Gate III to avoid colliding with Starfield’s launch, in turn delaying that of musical RPG Stray Gods. Baldur’s Gate III proceeded to outsell both games reaching 4X the number of Steam reviews of Starfield and 400x the reviews of Stray Gods. Were these games even in competition with each other?

• 297 streamers have played Stray Gods and 13,555 have played Baldur’s Gate III, and 81 streamed both.

• That is 27.27% of Stray Gods streamers and 0.60% of Baldur’s Gate III streamers.

• 297 streamers have played Stray Gods and 1,328 have played Starfield, and only 4 streamed both.

• That is 1.35% of Stray Gods streamers and 0.30% of Starfield streamers.

Confusion around identifying competitors can be found even among the world’s largest companies. In 2017 Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said their main competitor was not other streaming services like HBO, it was sleep:

Asked about the company’s competitors at Netflix’s earnings call, Hastings said that he isn’t really concerned about Amazon and HBO “because the market is just so vast”.

“You know, think about it, when you watch a show from Netflix and you get addicted to it, you stay up late at night. We’re competing with sleep, on the margin. And so, it’s a very large pool of time.”

He updated his thinking in Netflix’s 2018 Q4 shareholder letter saying their biggest competitor was actually Fortnite:

In the US, we earn around 10% of television screen time and less than that of mobile screen time. In other countries, we earn a lower percentage of screen time due to lower penetration of our service. We earn consumer screen time, both mobile and television, away from a very broad set of competitors. We compete with (and lose to) Fortnite more than HBO. When YouTube went down globally for a few minutes in October, our viewing and signups spiked for that time.

There’s some truth to Hasting’s belief that sleep is Netflix’s primary competitor. There’s only so much (screen) time in a day. For the average American, this amounts to about 7 hours per day. Attention is a scare resource. The Roblox creator, YouTuber, and Hollywood film studio are all competing for the same fragmented timeslots among consumers. The majority of this time was previously eaten up by TV. The internet enabled a new generation of creators and studios alike to distribute content at essentially zero marginal cost. Short form video, streaming services, and gaming began to dominate over TV. In 2020, Matthew Ball identified that the gradual shift away from TV might benefit the games industry the most.

[…] the real challenge for Hollywood is that for decades, whenever “leisure” won over “work”, TV was the primary beneficiary. In recent years, the leisure decision has changed or “moved up” a level. It used to be “what to watch” and now it’s “whether to watch” – and the answer is increasingly “no, I’m going to play a game”. Neither Netflix nor Hollywood has a good solution for this problem. And no one chooses not to game because there’s a branching narrative available instead.

But the growth of gaming isn’t necessarily a positive thing for indie developers. As the market grows so does competition. Since Steam became more widely accessible to indie developers in 2013, many have been fearful about the coming “indiepocalypse”, the idea that as more games are released it becomes increasingly difficult for indie developers to find success.

I get it, making games is hard enough. Now you’ve gotta share precious real estate with one of the most anticipated indie games ever on Steam. And no one can really predict if your game will succeed. If you spent years in development, the possibility of failure by release date can feel devastating. You’re mere weeks away from release, your game is pretty much set in stone and there’s not much left for you to fiddle with to alter your likelihood of success. All the important pieces—core concept, theme, art style, or game mechanics—were locked in months if not years ago. The only thing you can do is hedge your bets and blame your release date, or if that isn’t enough, blame capitalism. As Demonschool developer did in an interview on Aftermath discussing why they decided to delay the game due to Silksong:

Our game, Demonschool, is an RPG, basically. It’s an RPG with tactical battles, so you could argue that it doesn’t intersect with Silksong – which is sort of what I was arguing [with the publisher]. But the fact is, if you want to make decent money off your game – which, at this point, when you’ve been working on it for a bunch of years, you have to. I wish we didn’t live in a capitalist society, but guess what? We do. So I’ve gotta make a certain amount of money, we’re gonna run out of money, etc.

This fear of competition isn’t helped by the fact that “indie” is now being used as a marketing term by some of the biggest multinational game companies. A video marketing the launch of The Rogue Prince of Persia highlighted the game as indie, saying:

Prince of Persia Goes Indie
Indie Passion
Indie Creativity
Indie Freedom
Meets A Classic Franchise

Ubisoft has an estimated 16,000 employees and generates $2 billion in revenue annually. If a game supported by one of the largest games publishers is “indie,” then what does “indie” even mean anymore? The Rogue Prince of Persia was also victim to its own release date reshuffling, Ubisoft delayed the early access launch in 2024 due to the announcement of the early access date for Hades II.

The reality is, the release of The Rogue Prince of Persia and its subsequent positioning as indie has no effect on the share of indie games that players actually purchase and play. Neither does Silksong. I touched on this behind the paywall in my last essay. Game developers should be careful not to over-index on the opinions of Redditors, YouTubers and commentators on social media. Instead, look directly at the reviews, sales, and streaming data.

Steam is growing more than ever. In the 2024 Year In Review Steam highlighted that:

• New Release revenue per year has increased almost exactly 10x since 2014.

• In 2024, more than 500 new titles exceeded $250,000 in New Release revenue (up 27% from 2023).

• In 2024, more than 200 new titles exceeded $1 million in New Release revenue (up 15% from 2023).

Ignore all the noise. The very first decisions you make when setting out to make a game have significantly more impact on your likelihood for success than worrying about conflicting launch dates with the big dogs. Things like genre, concept, setting, mechanics, and art style are what makes your game more or less marketable. Make thoughtful decisions early and it might even feel like your game is designing itself. Derek Yu explains this in his book about the development of Spelunky:

Spelunky was both my easiest development and also most popular project to date, and I believe it’s because the key elements—the theme, the random level generation, and the destructible terrain—work together without friction. Nothing was compromised to make something else fit and each part only boosted the signal of the other parts.

I’m reminded of Shigeru Miyamoto’s definition of a good idea: “A good idea is something that does not solve just one single problem, but rather can solve multiple problems at once.” Once those good ideas were in place, it felt like it was only a matter of plugging in the obvious holes and adding more and more content. New ideas either made sense, fitting into the existing schema with only a little bit of finagling, or they were quickly rejected. In other words, Spelunky began to design itself from an early stage.

It looks like things will turn out fine for CloverPit anyway. The publishers said their release date delay tweet generated significantly more attention than their original date announcement.

Don’t freak out when the next highly anticipated AAA or “triple i” game drops. The indiepocalypse isn’t coming anytime soon.

Now, onto this week’s wishlist rundown…

Wishlist Rundown

Star Birds

In a recent essay on The Mediator, analyst Doug Shapiro posits that all media is marketing saying “most content may cease to be a profit center. Instead, it will become top-of-funnel to something else. Media will become marketing.” Among the examples he lists includes Mr Beast, who made $20 million in profits from Feastables, his chocolate company, while losing $80 million on his videos. YouTubers and Twitch streamers are starting coffee companies, hydration empires, and now, game studios.

Star Birds is a base-building and resource management game by popular YouTube video essayist Kurzgesagt in collaboration with Dorfromantik developer Toukana Interactive. The demo was very well received with 1,490 reviews sitting at 95% positive. Kurzgesagt’s art style is highly recognizable by a wide audience, so the interesting thing here is the choice of genre. Base building games have a median revenue of $3,100, which is very high when compared to other common indie genres such as puzzle platformers ($380 median revenue) and 2D platformers ($230 median revenue). The average playtime in the genre tends to be high as well, which bodes well for the concurrent user metrics that the Steam algorithm loves.

There are so many factors that go into what makes a game successful, but picking a genre you know well that also has a relatively high median revenue can be a good starting point. Game-stats.com has a useful page for reviewing this data.

See also: Waterpark Simulator, another recent example of the YouTuber to game developer pipeline, made by Caylus.

That’s it for the free preview. If you’re a paid subscriber, thanks so much for the support, I really appreciate it. Your subscription directly funds my obsession with understanding the indie games market on Steam.

If you’re not a paid subscriber, please consider upgrading for just $5 per month or $50 per year. You’ll gain access to my Wishlist Rundowns below where I highlight three upcoming indie games that have reached a significant number of wishlists on Steam before launch. You’ll get my take on why these games are hyped and why they’re suggestive of larger trends on Steam.

Game Data
Release Date: September 10, 2025
Estimated Wishlists: 338K
Wishlist Rank: #96
Steam Page Created: 15 months ago
Demo Info: Released June 9, 2025 / 1,490 reviews / 95% positive

Genre Data (Base Building)
Total Games: 5,404
Total Revenue: $2.3B
Median Revenue: $3.1K

Trainatic

The evolution of the clicker/idler/incremental genre over the last few years has been exciting. There’s a new aesthetic developing across games like Digseum, To The Core, Nodebuster, Tower Wizard, (the) Gnorp Apologue, Fill Up The Hole and more. The appeal of these games goes beyond the spreadsheet-inspired big number generators of the past like the originator of the genre Progress Quest and Universal Paperclips. Instead, these games attach pixel art visuals to a bunch of stuff bouncing around on screen to represent the “number go up” progression, similar to the chaos of late-game Vampire Survivors and other survivor-likes.

This is a great genre for solo indie developers. If you can come up with a strong concept, execute decently on the pixel art, and nail the big number scaling that’s key to these games, then you can make a pretty nice return. Trainatic smartly applies a popular and easy to understand theme (trains) to a relatively niche genre. This kind of thematic clarity is super important!

See also: I collected a couple useful links while prototyping my own incremental game a year or so ago, see: “Good numbers” for game design prototyping, Linear, Polynomial, Exponential (and more) growth explained, and The game that succeeded during the Starfield launch.

Game Data
Release Date: September 8, 2025
Estimated Wishlists: 26.5K
Wishlist Rank: #1,518
Steam Page Created: 7 months ago
Demo Info: Released May 24, 2025 / 86 reviews / 93% positive

Genre Data (Idler)
Total Games: 3,438
Total Revenue: $52M
Median Revenue: $310

The Trolley Solution

Some concepts sell themselves (another train game)! This collection of point and click minigames draws direct inspiration from the memeified thought experiment the trolley problem. A screenshot of the game is instantly recognizable as the art style closely mimics the popular meme’s crude hand-drawn look. The trailer was featured on the IGN YouTube channel and has racked up over 250K reviews.

A recognizable concept can make marketing your game significantly easier. Making a game based on a meme might feel a bit too on the nose for many indie developers. While drawing upon concepts that are already embedded in pop culture might come across as “pandering to the masses”, the formula has proven successful.

See also: Thomas Brush interview with Gavin Eisenbeisz, creator of the train(!) horror game Choo-Choo Charles.

Game Data
Release Date: September 12, 2025
Estimated Wishlists: 39.7K
Wishlist Rank: #998
Steam Page Created: 4 months ago
Demo Info: demo released, no longer available

Genre Data (Point & Click)
Total Games: 9,469
Total Revenue: $470M
Median Revenue: $1.1K

Thanks for reading and have a great week!

Share

The younger and more evasive cousin of the games industry, the metaverse, is also bottlenecked by the cost of asset production. But metaverse-hopeful games like Fortnite and Roblox have found a solution in the form of user-generated content (UGC). Recent hits like the record-breaking Grow A Garden on Roblox demonstrate that a new generation of developers and players have a very different relationship to asset quality and fidelity compared to typical hardcore gamers of years past.

For games built around user-generated content, it's the quantity, not the quality, of the assets that matters. The aesthetics of user-generated content in Roblox and Fortnite are a direct result of this dynamic. Players create assets with simplified 3D tools, rather than trained artists using expensive, hard-to-master 3D modeling software. Contrary to popular belief, art style is downstream of technical constraints and economic conditions. In an interview with Mitch Lasky and Blake Robbins on the art and business of gaming, Acquired co-host Ben Gilbert explains:

I think the common narrative is, video games are something created by creative geniuses, a Miyamoto type person, and then the business models rearranged around the creative vision having consumers that flocked to it. I think, already, you're introducing this interesting wedge of, actually, there are very clear business models that guide where the water of creativity can flow. That has been, for the last 50 years, what has defined the video game industry, not the other way around.

Ben Thompson succinctly outlines this history and connects it to gaming’s more troubled cousin, virtual reality, in DALL-E, the Metaverse, and Zero Marginal Content, saying:

Soon games included motion as you navigated a sprite through a 2D world; 3D followed, and most of the last 25 years has been about making 3D games ever more realistic. Nearly all of those games, though, are 3D images on 2D screens; virtual reality offers the illusion of being inside the game itself.

Still, this evolution has had challenges: creating ever more realistic 3D games means creating ever more realistic image textures to decorate all of those polygons; this problem is only magnified in virtual reality. This is one of the reasons even open-world games are ultimately limited in scope, and gameplay is largely deterministic: it is through knowing where you are going, and all of your options to get there, that developers can create all of the assets necessary to deliver an immersive experience.

Indie game developers must be especially creative in contending with the cost of asset production. For a bootstrapped indie, that is, an independent developer or studio not funded by a publisher or investor, cost comes in the form of time spent rather than cash. The more time that passes the riskier your project becomes. One of the most effective ways to de-risk your project is to set strict time constraints as I outlined recently in Six months or bust.

As a business savvy indie your job is to keep your costs low and your ideas high-impact. This immediately rules out many game genres that are especially costly in the form of production time like battle royale shooters, open world survival craft, and colony sims; and game genres that require extremely bespoke art styles to stand out like 2D platformers.

Horror, on the other hand, is one of a few genres that is especially well-suited for a low-cost, high-impact approach. Horror games tap directly into player emotions. Games in other genres have to put in significant work to make a player really feel something. While it still requires artistic finesse, it’s technically a lot easier to spook someone with a jump scare than it is to create a thousands of hand drawn assets as seen in Hollow Knight and the much anticipated sequel Silksong. With the right combination of environment design, lighting, atmosphere, and sound fx, a single looping hallway can have a player shaking in their boots in a matter of minutes.

The low-cost, high-impact nature of horror can be seen outside of the games industry as well. The horror film production company Blumhouse was founded on this very principle. A recent Wall Street Journal article on Blumhouse describes this saying:

Jason Blum wasn’t drawn to making horror movies because of the thrills. He liked that the genre was low-cost. 

“You can’t make an inexpensive action movie that will stand up,” said Blum, 56. His production company Blumhouse turns 15 this year and has been responsible for over $9 billion in global box-office earnings through movies and franchises including “The Purge,” “Paranormal Activity” and “Get Out.” 

Blum says his business model—keeping costs as low as possible while giving directors and actors equity in their movies’ box office sucess—allows him and his collaborators to experiment. “To have so much money at risk clouds my thinking, probably because I’m so cheap,” Blum said. Plus, studios still spend to market his low-cost films with big campaigns.

As an indie developer you’re in a special position to fulfill demand not through more high-cost content, but through less content produced at a drastically lower cost. Your game concept and art style are the biggest determinants for your cost.

Our small team of three experienced this recently while prototyping one of our new game ideas. We initially set out to create a short horror game inspired by PT with an ultra-realistic art style leveraging all the new tools in Unreal Engine 5. We quickly realized this approach wasn’t going to work. The time it took for us to create a single asset, from modeling to UV unwrapping to texturing, to scene placement, and lighting was absurd on our low (nonexistent) budget. We’re trying to create a game in a few months not years.

This led me to understand that, as a bootstrapped indie, you have two options:

1. Use asset packs

2. Build an aesthetic around your low cost production process

You’d be surprised at how many games take the former approach. The Cabin Factory is a great example of how developers can leverage asset packs to create a unique, appealing, and marketable game. Most if not all of the assets in the game are sourced from asset stores (see screenshots below).

The second approach, building an aesthetic around a low cost production process, allows for a bit more creative freedom. Games like R.E.P.O. and Lethal Company are perfect examples of this. R.E.P.O is filled with low poly assets with low texture resolutions and exposed UV seams. Look closely and you’ll notice that many assets have drastically different texel densities. The developers clearly valued speed over perfection when creating their 3D environments and props. And because the game has a coherent and well define art style, it all fits together fluidly, nothing feels out of place.

Now, onto this week’s wishlist rundown…

Wishlist Rundown

Car Service Simulator

The job simulator genre continues to see a steady stream of new releases. I wrote about the meditative appeal of the genre in my recent post Another day on the job simulator. Car Service Simulator by Turkish studio Red Axe is fairly self explanatory, it follows the typical Playway-style simulator gameplay loop of repair→deliver→upgrade. It would be easy to assume that the job simulator genre as a whole is oversaturated, but even hyper-specific subcategories like this one have multiple successful entrants. Car Dealer Simulator released in May 2025 grossed an estimated $3.9M, Car Mechanic Simulator 2021 released in August 2021 grossed an estimated $41M, and My Summer Car released in January 2025 grossed an estimated $26M.

Game Data
Release Date: August 29, 2025
Estimated Wishlists: 33.9K
Wishlist Rank: #1,312
Steam Page Created: 12 months ago
Demo Info: no demo released

Genre Data (Job Simulator)
Total Games: 405
Total Revenue: $31M
Median Revenue: $3.4K

Garten of Banban 8: Anti Devil

Another entry in the recent but prolific mascot horror series Garten of Banban. Some especially vocal players have questioned the series’s popularity over the years, saying developer Euphoric Brothers are “just in it for the cash grab.” Some YouTuber’s have even claimed the mascot horror genre trend was “over” back in 2023. Reviews for the first game currently sit at Mixed on steam at 53% positive.

This series is a good reminder for developers to be careful about over-indexing on the opinions of Redditors and YouTubers when it comes to trends. Instead, look directly at sales data and player reviews. The last game in the series Garten of Banban 7 reached an estimated $315K in gross revenue. Not bad for a game that seemingly too just a few months to make. I believe the mascot horror framework will continue to have legs far into the future.

See also: Amanda the Adventurer and Amanda the Adventurer 2

Game Data
Release Date: August 28, 2025
Estimated Wishlists: 73.6K
Wishlist Rank: #1,198
Steam Page Created: 16 months ago
Demo Info: no demo released

Genre Data (Psychological Horror)
Total Games: 11,025
Total Revenue: $2.2B
Median Revenue: $1.5K

Bad Cheese

Bad Cheese is one of a number of indie games that build upon the character concepts and stylings of Disney’s Mickey Mouse. Original versions of Mickey and Minnie Mouse from the 1928 animated short Steamboat Willie entered the public domain in January 2024, and can now be freely shared, adapted, or remixed. Other examples include co-op horror game Infestation: Origins and boomer shooter MOUSE: P.I. For Hire.

Similarly, original designs for Winnie-the-Pooh entered the public domain in 2022 and at least a couple games have cropped up that directly reference the character including survival horror game Hundred Acre Wood and roguelike deckbuilder/dungeon crawler Winnie’s Hole.

There are many examples of indie horror games that twist known pop culture characters and brands into nostalgia-filled and terror-inducing game concepts, but they most often look to more recent decades for inspiration. An especially successful example can be seen in the mascot horror franchise Five Nights at Freddy’s interpretation of the Chuck E. Cheese and animatronic characters and restaurant environment. Bad Cheese is a unique example that instead draws inspiration from nearly 100 year old IP.

Game Data
Release Date: September 1, 2025
Estimated Wishlists: 44.4K
Wishlist Rank: #920
Steam Page Created: 11 months ago
Demo Info: Released February 7, 2025 / 119 reviews / 91% positive

Genre Data (Psychological Horror)
Total Games: 11,025
Total Revenue: $2.2B
Median Revenue: $1.5K

Thanks for reading and have a great weekend!

Share 9000 Dimensions

Across visual art, fashion, music, film, and literature, you’ll find countless books and documentaries detailing the lives of people who worked themselves to death to realize their ideas. These stories provide solace to those who haven’t yet made it. Your continued struggle is just a sign that you walk the same path as the renegades before you. And even if you don’t succeed in life, there’s always recognition after death, as with Van Gogh, who died broke and nameless, having sold no more than a couple of paintings.

The great myths of the starving artist can be validating. It’s not that my ideas are bad, it’s that I’m misunderstood. It’s not that I don’t know my audience, it’s that I’m ahead of my time. It’s a relief to pin your failures on the algorithm, the suits, the industry, or simply capitalism.

This is reinforced by the belief that the creative process is sacrosanct. In his widely read book on creativity, Rick Rubin says “without the spiritual component, the artist works with a crucial disadvantage.” For many creatives, an idea is like an irritant in an oyster. Leave a bit of grit or stray tissue undisturbed within its shell and the oyster builds layers until a pearl forms. Considering something as lowly as the audience or marketability can feel tantamount to prying open that shell and crushing it on the seafloor before the pearl has had a chance to emerge.

If ideas are sacred then earthly sacrifices are a necessary part of the creative process. F. Scott Fitzgerald may have drank himself sick and died at 44 before anyone had even heard of The Great Gatsby, but neglecting your health or family is increasingly passé with the turn of the century. Work/life balance entered the popular lexicon in the 2000s. Basecamp founders David Heinemeier Hansson and Jason Fried exemplify this shift in their 2018 book It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work:

[…] long hours, excessive busyness, and lack of sleep have become a badge of honor for many people these days. Sustained exhaustion is not a badge of honor, it’s a mark of stupidity.

Perhaps the days of witnessing your colleagues die from stress-induced heart attacks, as told in the recent Apple In China, are waning. But there is still honor to be found in one remaining sacrificial lamb…money.

Stardew Valley creator Eric Barone is one of many in the indie games universe who have publicly expressed indifference or animosity toward money. When asked how much Stardew Valley updates or DLC would cost he said:

Nothing. It’s just like, I don’t care. I don’t care about money that much to be honest. I’m not trying to virtue signal, but I honestly don’t care about money that much. It’s never been the driving, motivating factor. What I care about is people loving the game.

As of 2024, 41 million copies of Stardew Valley have been sold. Rough estimates put Barone’s revenue from the game somewhere in the ballpark of $500 million. This idea that financial sacrifice is honorable can be found throughout contemporary creative culture. For established game developers, expectations of financial success can feel like unnecessary pressure, as Lucas Pope explains in connection to his recent game for the Playdate handheld console titled Mars After Midnight.

There's a lot of expectation attached to anything I do now. There's a lot of pressure following up Papers, Please, and Obra Dinn, and making something else that everyone's going to love. With the Playdate, it lowers the temperature on that expectation, especially because I made it clear this is a game I'm making for my kids, which is aimed at kids. That part is worth a lot more than just money or sales.

Many creatives share the feeling that some ideas are worth pursuing for a whole host of reasons other than money. This attitude is embodied by even the most inexperienced creatives. And it is implicit in arts education. The NYU Game Design BFA, which describes itself as “a well-rounded, interdisciplinary degree,” includes just one elective on the business side of making games. This course is offered not through the games department, but through NYU Stern’s Marketing Department with only a few reserved seats for game design students.

Many prefer to ignore the money side of things. They see it as a necessary evil in the way of true creative expression. As Joost van Dreunen, professor of said course at NYU, discusses in his book on the business of games titled One Up:

In my role as a teacher at New York University’s Game Center and the Stern School of Business, I’ve repeatedly observed the tendency among aspiring creatives to sacrifice any financial expectations to see their creative vision become reality. All too often, when asked how they would fund their proposed game company, my students answered they’d just eat ramen for six months. This idealized notion of the bohemian creative is a common one. But it is also incredibly naive.

The industry carries part of the blame: many of its professionals abhor conversations about money. They hold to the dogma that “money is evil” and insist that it is merely a by-product of their creative effort rather than a foundational principle of the for-profit activity in which they find themselves involved. Where technical challenges generally are met with enthusiasm, any financial limitations are considered unworthy. In my experience, the mere mention of any of its manifestations (e.g., corporate office, the suits, investors, or quarterly review) immediately provokes a brief ceremony of overt collective disdain during which everyone sides with creativity and distances themselves from the mundanity of money.

How did creative people come to believe that money is evil, their ideas are sacred, commercialization is the enemy, and total sacrifice, including months of surviving on instant noodles, is necessary if you want to realize your ideas?

I worked in the arts for 15 years and worked with many artists who shared this sentiment. Some years ago I worked on a project called [REDACTED]. It was a highly technical and scientific music concert and live performance. It was conceptually very unique. And for many of the venues we negotiated with across North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia, it was too unique. With 10 tons of custom equipment on stage, the setup was also high-risk from an insurance standpoint. Any failure would have been disastrous for a venue hosting the project.

The artists were incredibly dedicated in realizing this project, they had been working on it for over 6 years before they hired us to produce it. We managed to put together a world tour despite apprehension from a number of venues. After all the costs surrounding shipping the equipment, insurance, modest accommodations and fees for the performers, the show barely broke even. The artists were so attached to their ideas that they remained blind to the financial risks inherent to the project. The group continued to tour the work without our involvement. A year later, while performing at a venue in Europe, disaster struck. One of the pieces of equipment malfunctioned and the venue was completely ruined. The artists went on to file for bankruptcy.

When I began making games and getting a feel for the industry, I thought things would be different. Games are a highly industrialized medium. As opposed to touring experimental live performance, there’s no uncertainty that games are commercial products. Surely even indie developers must do market research and risk analysis, I thought. But, as I detailed in my recent post on 50 things for game developers, resources are few and far between when in comes to the business side of games. Perhaps I underestimated the influence that the “games as art” discourse has had on indie games.

The average indie developer doesn’t realize that the median gross revenue for a 3D platformer on Steam is just $230. It’s not that there aren’t successes. There are 377 games 3D platformers that grossed over $100K according to data from GameDiscoverCo, but there are over 5,000 3D platformers that failed to surpass $20K in gross revenue. Most game developers come to this realization silently, tail between their legs, after releasing their first game.

Part of the challenge is, market research can be sobering and boring. It’s much easier to bask in the excitement of your latest greatest idea. You might even find yourself losing that spark you first felt if you dare evaluate your ideas for marketability.

I experienced this while making my first game, which I’ve written about previously. We became obsessed with our sacred ideas, gathering books and references and making mood boards. When it came to being realistic about the cost of implementing our ideas and the overall appeal for the kinds of players we were looking to reach, we were resistant. We didn’t want to kill our momentum and excitement each time we realized our latest concept or prototype would probably have a hard time finding an audience. After a failed launch the studio drastically downsized and I was laid off.

I believe there’s a way to thread the needle between the joy of creative expression and the reality of the games market. It’s just another creative muscle you’ve got to build, and eventually learn to flex. Creator of the horror game Home Safety Hotline (which I wrote about in my recent Steam Report on Computer Use games) shares a similar perspective in a Patreon post titled “Why I love marketing” saying:

I know a lot of creative people who would balk at the idea of considering things like hooks, target audiences, and industry trends when conceptualizing ideas for their art. I can see how it could feel like being your own cynical CEO, barging in on artists demanding changes to appease the mass market. But I don't really see it that way. I see it more as an interesting set of creative constraints, or like a creative prompt. In other words, I think it can actually fuel creativity. Our recent horror hit, Home Safety Hotline was a game concept born almost entirely of these kinds of creative constraints!

Game engines like Unreal, Unity, Godot and 3D tools like Blender are free to download. Each have massive communities surrounding them with vast ecosystems of educational content. The Unreal Source Discord server, an independent community for discussing Unreal Engine, has over 120K members. There are hundreds, maybe thousands of tutorials on YouTube on how to make 3D models in Blender. The Blender donut tutorial, one of the more popular entry points for aspiring 3D artists, has 9.5M views.

There are countless books, courses, and videos covering the artistic and technical aspects of making a game. But when it comes to the more slippery disciplines of the craft and the industry surrounding it, there’s a real lack of resources. At least, that’s what I thought when I first set out to make games.

I felt there had to be a trove of best practices and information hidden behind the walled gardens of the big AAA and even indie studios. And this was partly true. It has taken me a good deal of digging over the years to find resources covering the business of games including topics like strategy, marketing, and finance, as well as deeper aspects of game making like game design, systems design, narrative design, and level design.

The games industry is still relatively young, and the contemporary flavor of the indie ecosystem began in just 2017 with the launch of Steam Direct. Prior to this, launching a game on Steam was more of an opaque popularity contest. Developers had to campaign for votes in an effort to compete for acceptance through Steam’s Greenlight program. Now anyone can put a game on Steam for a one time fee of $100.

It turns out trying to learn about the business of games is much more of a minefield than I first understood. Joost van Dreunen explains in his book One Up: Creativity, Competition, and the Global Business of Video Games:

Studying the business of video games is a fool’s errand. After spending the past two decades analyzing this industry from different angles and in different contexts, I’ve learned as much. For one, few people outside of this entertainment business will take you seriously. Even now, when seemingly every teenager in the world plays Fortnite and hordes of people armed with their smartphones scour their hometowns for digital Pokémon, many still regard video games as an odd phenomenon. Had I built a career around Shakespearean literature or low-power radio, I reckon, I would have at least been considered intellectually exotic enough to be respected. But studying games? That’s just a waste of time.

Worse yet, even people from inside the industry may treat you with disdain. As in many creative industries, the incessant presumption is that artists and designers create all the value. They are the anointed ones. The unfortunate fools who handle the business side of things are an inconvenient compromise necessary to reach a broader audience. Marketers are mercenaries, and the analysts and economists are soulless bean counters who add little magic.

It is perhaps because of this circumstance that the average person’s understanding of the business of video games has remained rather limited. Few understand the industry’s inner workings at large, including many of the people whose very livelihood depends on it. In my day job as an industry analyst, for example, I deal with financial investors and hedge fund managers. I frequently am dumbfounded by the seemingly inverted relationship between the large amounts of money an investment fund commits to buying shares in publicly traded game companies and the lack of understanding of the business of interactive entertainment. Despite commanding billions in assets and the ability to move markets, insight into this creative industry among most investors tends to be rudimentary at best.

For independent game developers, especially those who self publish, the art and business of games is tightly intertwined. Ignore the business side of things and you’re destined for failure. The era of indie developer as renegade artist, as seen in 2012’s Indie Game: The Movie, is over. The market is just too competitive. When the documentary came out there were around 30 games released on Steam per month. Now, it’s up to almost 2000 per month.

A common mantra among seasoned indie developers is that the best thing you can do to get better at making games is to make more games. But what about getting better at all the other stuff?

This list contains 50 hand-picked resources covering all the things you won’t learn from just making games. Drop a comment below, reply to this email, or DM me here or on X if you have anything I didn’t include that you think I should check out.

These are in no particular order…

1. One Up by and his newsletter contains the most clearheaded thinking about the games industry that I’ve come across. The prologue, which I quoted in part in my intro above, is worth the price of the book alone.

2. Sid Meier's Memoir, Meier famously said games are a “series of interesting decisions” in this GDC talk which is also worth a watch.

3. GameDiscoverCo newsletter and database by , the newsletter is worth the $19 per month on its own but along with that you get access to the best Steam data and analytics tool out there (I use it all the time).

4. You have to read all of books including Blood Sweat and Pixels, Press Reset, and Play Nice.

5. The popular GDC YouTube channel contains many great talks by people in all kinds of different positions in the industry. There’s also the GDC Vault, which contains the full archive of GDC talks, but carries a pretty hefty price. It’s worth browsing if you can gain access through your company or school.

6. SteamDB for comprehensive Steam stats, this is nicely paired with the GameDiscoverCo back end mentioned above. It’s more of a firehose of every possible piece of data pulled from Steam. The concurrent users chart is a good page to periodically check in on.

7. by , a fantastic weekly newsletter that dances the fine line between game making and game marketing in a way that’s hard to find anywhere else. See Is Making A Great Game All That Matters.

8. Masters of Doom, a fun read that tells story of the founding of id Software and the creation of Doom, with many lessons still relevant to indie developers today.

9. How To Market A Game blog, courses and discord server. This was the first resource that really opened my eyes to the vastness of the Steam market and how to navigate it. The Wishlist & Visibility Masterclass is a must for any new indie developer.

10. Derek Lieu on how to make a trailer, the only resource you need for getting better at making your own trailers.

11. Steam Revenue Calculator, sales data for games on Steam isn’t publicly available, but you can get a rough idea of how much money a game made using this tool.

12. Streamforge is a good for finding streamers who might like your game. Streamer coverage has been one of the more effective ways to “market” your game (although maybe we’re reaching a saturation point). The best features are paid, but depending on your position it could be worth the cost.

13. Matthew Ball’s book The Metaverse is a must read, particularly the newer edition which contains a history of Epic Games along with sections on AI and XR. His comprehensive report on the State of Video Gaming and many other essays are essential materials as well.

14. Gamecraft Podcast, I blasted through the first two seasons when I first found this. An incredible deep dive into the history of the games business by Mitch Lasky and Blake Robbins.

15. by , his three part series on how to connect with players is fantastic and should be widely read by indie developers.

16. by Jeff Vogel who is the longest running independent game developer having founded his studio Spiderweb Software in 1994.

17. , the newsletter by game designer, Founding Chair of the NYU Game Center, and creator of Universal Paperclips, is a must subscribe. His recent book, The Beauty of Games, is a much welcomed update to the thinking about games as art.

18. Developer’s Dilemma by Casey O'Donnell, I just started this one after seeing in mentioned in One Up. It sits nicely alongside Jason Schreier’s books covering the processes of making a game in detail from pre-production through production.

19. Gavin Eisenbeisz’s YouTube channel, the creator of Choo-Choo Charles and recently announced Cuff Bust. His video on retention and virality is a highlight.

20. Matthewmatosis’s YouTube channel contains thoughtful video essays on a wide variety of games. I’ve found them to be helpful in reminding me to “think like a player”. He also recently released his own game called Logic Bombs.

21. Wookash Podcast is one of the best game-related programming podcasts.

22. Game Feel by Steve Swink is my favorite game design-related textbook.

23. Gamemakers Toolkit, a popular YouTube channel that covers a wide range of game design topics.

24. Game Balance book by Brenda Romero and Ian Schreiber, this filled a lot of gaps for me when it comes to thinking about game balance especially for more systemic games.

25. is a good follow for keeping up to date with what’s going on in the industry especially on the AAA side of things.

26. , similar to the the above, a good place to stay on top of industry news.

27. An Architectural Approach to Level Design by Christopher Totten is an essential read for every game designer.

28. 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School, related to the above, contains lots of ideas relevant to level design.

29. The Fourth Curtain podcast which features interviews with many designers, I liked the recent one with Kim Swift who worked on Portal and Left 4 Dead.

30. Jonas Tyroller’s YouTube channel, his video on “design as a search algorithm” is a highlight.

31. Thomas Brush’s YouTube channel features consistenly interesting interviews with a wide range of indie devs.

32. GameDev Business Handbook, useful for anyone who needs a 101-level introduction to starting and running a game studio.

33. Run Studio Run which is more broadly for creative agencies and studios, but contains relevant info for running small game studios.

34. Ben Thompson’s Console and Competition article on Stratechery succinctly summarizes the history of the games industry starting with OXO from 1952.

35. Timothy Cain, creator of the Fallout series and co-director for The Outer Worlds, has an incredibly comprehensive YouTube channel where he discusses every possible topic related to game development that you can imagine

36. How To Make A Video Game All By Yourself by Matt Hackett, a nice little pocket reader that contains some good tips and cautionary tales aimed at first time developers.

37. Exploring Roguelike Games is a comprehensive history of roguelikes that’s useful for developers making a game in the genre or more generally making simulation or systems-heavy games.

38. Advanced Game Design: A Systems Approach by Michael Sellers is the best resource on systems-driven game design.

39. Game Programming Patterns by Robert Nystrom, this book is more aimed at programmers, but is useful for anyone interested in better understanding how to structure the underlying systems of a game.

40. Derek Yu’s blog which includes a very good four part series on indie game development.

41. Many of the Boss Fight books, too many good ones to list out. My favorite is Derek Yu’s on the making of Spelunky.

42. The Making Prince of Persia which includes journal entries and sketches from creator Jordan Mechner.

43. Pop into one of The Game Doctor’s daily Twitch streams, the way he thinks about tutorialization and player expectations is refreshing.

44. The Eggplant podcast including the recent series on UFO 50, covering all 50 games in the compendium, and the Into the Depths series. Playing all 50 of the UFO 50 games is a good self directed course in game design in and of itself.

45. The Gamedev Book covers the gritty details of making games from Wlad Marhulets, the creator of the 2D puzzle platformer Darq.

46. Masahiro Sakurai’s YouTube channel is an absolute goldmine.

47. Ask Iwata collects a bunch of ideas from the former Nintendo President and CEO, “On my business card, I am a corporate president. In my mind, I am a game developer. But in my heart, I am a gamer.”

48. Console Wars is a comprehensive history of the console-dominated era that serves as an important resource for understanding the big players in industry.

49. Rules of Play is a massive tome that I imagine is often assigned as a part of game design programs at many colleges and universities. It’s a good book to have on the shelf.

50. The Art of Game Design should also be on your bookshelf.

Some games have you outrunning the cops to pull off your next big drug deal (Schedule 1), others have you fighting your way from humble beginnings to knighthood in medieval Bohemia (Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2), and still others drop you half-naked into the wilderness to build a fortress against online rivals (Rust). A rare few have you sitting at a desk… using a computer.

This Microgenre Report covers a microgenre I’m calling Computer Use1, which includes games stripped down to a tautological state where the core gameplay takes place solely within a computer interface. They range from job sims to idlers, visual novels, dating sims, hacking sims, horror games, and detective games.

Most tap into a 90s or Y2K nostalgia, whether you’re interacting with a riff on the Microsoft digital assistant Clippy in KinitoPet or browsing geocities-like websites in Hypnospace Outlaw. In the bestselling Computer Use game, NEEDY STREAMER OVERLOAD, the player manages the life and career of a Twitch streamer, but even its interface is reminiscent of Windows 2000, an operating system released 10 years before the live streaming service spun off from Justin.tv.

While most of the Computer Use games are contained to a flat UI, I found the amped up-atmosphere of recent releases s.p.l.i.t. and Dead Letter Dept. particularly appealing with their minimal rooms and first person perspective. The microgenre is well suited for horror and detective/mystery games. Enough time has passed that just the look and feel of a 90s computer interface boasts a similar eeriness to VHS filters and camcorders, common tropes in the analog horror genre.

These games rely on especially strong narrative and thematic direction. Although the visual interfaces can be fairly simple, (the developers of FACEMINER credit a publicly available css library, at least in part, for their UI design) they rely heavily on thoughtful atmosphere and sometimes fully voice-acted dialogue as is the case in Home Safety Hotline.

Shutter Story catches my eye among the yet-to-be-released games. It draws inspiration from the Home Safety Hotline inspection format, presenting players with a photo editing interface to uncover clues about the entity haunting a family. The gameplay is also reminiscent of I’m on Observation Duty, which I wrote about in my previous report.

In contrast to The Exit 8, the top-selling game in my last report, which broke through the bounds of Steam and into Hollywood (or at least the film festival circuit), games in the Computer Use microgenre seem to have a more niche appeal. But, upon closer inspection, some have found relatively massive commercial success, with the top title earning more than eight times The Exit 8’s revenue. In my assessment, these games are much more likely to be adequately priced with many of the games included listed at $9.99 or more.

I would argue this microgenre traces back to 1985 with the aptly named hacking simulator Hacker. Later games like Uplink (2001) further explored the hacker angle. Game designer Christine Love brought the games to the BBS age with Digital: A Love Story (2009). The timeline for my report starts in 2015 with Her Story and Hacknet. I do not include games like SUPERHOT or Buddy Simulator 1984 where the game is only narratively framed as being played inside an in-world computer. I limited my analysis to games that involve the player directly interacting with a computer interface using a keyboard and/or mouse.

Let’s dive in…

GENRE OVERVIEW - COMPUTER USE
Games Included: 17
Estimated Total Market Volume: $37M
Estimated Median Gross Revenue: $1M
Median Review Score: 92%
Average Length: 3.8 hours
Meidan Price: $9.99

An important note on revenue estimates: Actual gross revenue figures on Steam are not publicly available. The revenue estimates in this report are sourced from GameDiscoverCo and may differ significantly from real earnings. I include them, along with revenue-based tiers, to give a rough "squint test" of each game's relative success.

Top-Tier Hits

Games that made over $1M in estimated gross revenue

NEEDY STREAMER OVERLOAD

NEEDY STREAMER OVERLOAD is a life-sim, visual novel, and psychological horror game with connections to the character-raising sim subgenre including the Princess Maker series, Chinese Parents, Long Live The Queen and more recently Volcano Princess. You manage Ame (streamer name: KAngel) for 30 days, moderating her streams, raising her follower count, and juggling her stress, affection, and mental darkness levels. The game features 25 possible endings based on the choices players make throughout 30 in-game days. It explores social media addiction, fame-chasing, and the extremes of parasocial relationships (see also Parasocial). NEEDY STREAMER OVERLOAD sold extremely well (it was a blind spot for me until doing this research) and offers one of the clearest design templates for character-raising sims built around a computer interface.

RELEASE INFO
January 22, 2022
Average Length: 3 hours
Price: $15.99

RANKINGS
1 - Gross Revenue
3 - All Time High Concurrent Users (ATH CCU)
5 - All Time High Monthly Twitch Viewers (ATH MTV)

STATS
Gross Revenue: $16.6M
Reviews: 45,344
Review Score: 94%
ATH CCU: 3,674
ATH MTV: 52,486

Hacknet

A realistic hacking simulator that uses actual UNIX commands. Since its release in 2015, many other hacking games have drawn inspiration from Hacknet, and there is even a dedicated hacking tag on Steam. Due to the subgenre’s visibility, I have included only a couple notable examples in this report. You can find many more on the tag page, including CaseCracker, Anonymous Hacker Simulator, Grey Hack, and Hacker Simulator. See also the programming tag on Steam.

RELEASE INFO
August 8, 2015
Average Length: 7 hours
Price: $9.99

RANKINGS
2 - Gross Revenue
2 - All Time High Concurrent Users (ATH CCU)
12 - All Time High Monthly Twitch Viewers (ATH MTV)

STATS
Gross Revenue: $10M
Reviews: 16,187
Review Score: 93%
ATH CCU: 127,640
ATH MTV: 5,676

Orwell: Keeping an Eye On You

An investigation job sim where you must gather data using comprehensive surveillance tools to figure out who was responsible for a terrorist bombing in a fictionalized country called The Nation. You read news articles, emails, texts, and transcribed phone calls and attempt to make connections between people seen at the site of the bombing. The game successfully translates the core appeal of detective games into a modern political context. The sequel, Orwell: Ignorance is Strength, uses a similar sleek, faux government agency computer interface and expands on the political sim aspects.

RELEASE INFO
October 27, 2016
Average Length: 4.5
Price: $9.99

RANKINGS
3 - Gross Revenue
1 - All Time High Concurrent Users (ATH CCU)
6 - All Time High Monthly Twitch Viewers (ATH MTV)

STATS
Gross Revenue: $2M
Reviews: 8,497
Review Score: 90%
ATH CCU: 154,375
ATH MTV: 32,777

Hypnospace Outlaw

It’s 1999 and you’re surfing the underbelly of the world wide web. Browse geocities-style websites to find evidence of illicit activities including weapons assembly, malware distribution, use of copy-written material, multi-level marketing schemes, and more. The websites themselves are super varied and filled with all the crunchy jpgs, animated gifs, and stylized text you’d expect from the early Angelfire era. Hypnospace Outlaw succeeds by embracing the surreal and disjointed aesthetic of the late 90s internet and is especially visually distinct among the other games in the microgenre.

RELEASE INFO
March 12, 2019
Average Length: 6 hours
Price: $19.99

RANKINGS
4 - Gross Revenue
10 - All Time High Concurrent Users (ATH CCU)
3 - All Time High Monthly Twitch Viewers (ATH MTV)

STATS
Gross Revenue: $1.9M
Reviews: 4,262
Review Score: 96%
ATH CCU: 169
ATH MTV: 65,776

KinitoPet

A psychological horror game set within a distorted version of your own desktop, styled after Windows XP. It was played by many popular streamers including xQc. KinitoPet is one of two Computer Use games that explore the computer virus as a core narrative and gameplay element (see also Winion Virus). The game has some really interesting experimental perspective shifts and surprises and is best played spoiler-free. It’s by far one of the weirdest games in the genre and cool to see how well it sold.

RELEASE INFO
January 9, 2024
Average Length: 1.5 hours
Price: $5.99

RANKINGS
5 - Gross Revenue
6 - All Time High Concurrent Users (ATH CCU)
2 - All Time High Monthly Twitch Viewers (ATH MTV)

STATS
Gross Revenue: $1.4M
Reviews: 11,587
Review Score: 93%
ATH CCU: 655
ATH MTV: 74,565

Her Story

Her Story is a FMV murder mystery game that kicked off the microgenre (according to my modern timeline) in 2015. The game involves the player browsing a police database viewing videos of a woman being interrogated in connection to her husband’s murder. The core gameplay mechanic is simple, search for keywords to find new videos and gather clues. You’ll spend the most of the game watching the interviews and jotting down notes. The game performed well considering it’s situated in a very niche genre (FMV). Sam Barlow’s follow up Telling Lies, follows a similar format.

See also The Roottrees Are Dead, which features the use of a computer, but which I omitted from this report as its core gameplay takes place primarily among manila folders of documents and an investigation corkboard.

RELEASE INFO
June 24, 2015
Average Length: ???
Average Price: $9.99

RANKINGS
6 - Gross Revenue
14 - All Time High Concurrent Users (ATH CCU)
9 - All Time High Monthly Twitch Viewers (ATH MTV)

STATS
Gross Revenue: $1.3M
Reviews: 7,873
Review Score: 89%
ATH CCU: 64
ATH MTV: 22,818

The Operator

A narrative-driven detective sim where you play as an agent of the “FDI,” tasked with finding clues, piecing together evidence, and solving puzzles. The core gameplay, reminiscent of the Orwell series, involves sifting through a vast trove of information to uncover hidden connections.

RELEASE INFO
January 22, 2024
Average Length: 3.5 hours
Average Price: $13.99

RANKINGS
7 - Gross Revenue
4 - All Time High Concurrent Users (ATH CCU)
8 - All Time High Monthly Twitch Viewers (ATH MTV)

STATS
Gross Revenue: $1.2M
Reviews: 6,373
Review Score: 92%
ATH CCU: 1,326
ATH MTV: 24,028

Home Safety Hotline

Your job is to answer calls from concerned homeowners and browse the home safety database to figure out what their household hazard is ranging from bed bugs, carbon monoxide, termites, and mice. The game quickly takes an unsettling turn as callers start to inform you of bizarre issues that include things like “false beets” which are described as “harmless unless eaten by a human, at which point they will take root in the human’s stomach, feeding off its nutrients for its lifetime”. The game is well paced with increasingly disturbing calls interrupted by prank calls, emails from corporate, and public access-style videos that appear on your desktop. A simple Windows 95-esque interface combined with an excellent concept and narrative go a long way.

RELEASE INFO
January 16, 2024
Average Length: 2.5 hours
Price: $14.99

RANKINGS
8 - Gross Revenue
7 - All Time High Concurrent Users (ATH CCU)
4 - All Time High Monthly Twitch Viewers (ATH MTV)

STATS
Gross Revenue: $1M
Reviews: 2,198
Review Score: 91%
ATH CCU: 359
ATH MTV: 65,420

Mid-Tier Successes

Games that made $250K – $1M in estimated gross revenue

Emily is Away <3

Emily is Away <3 is the third game in a series by developer Kyle Seeley that includes Emily is Away and Emily is Away Too. The game takes place entirely in a recreation of the early Facebook interface. You play as a high school kid messaging friends and crushes as you pick from one of three dialogue choices to push the story forward.

RELEASE INFO
April 16, 2021
Average Length: 4.5
Price: $9.99

RANKINGS
9 - Gross Revenue
11 - All Time High Concurrent Users (ATH CCU)
1 - All Time High Monthly Twitch Viewers (ATH MTV)

STATS
Gross Revenue: $843K
Reviews: 5,601
Review Score: 92%
ATH CCU: 152
ATH MTV: 251,419

S4U: CITYPUNK 2011 AND LOVE PUNCH

You dig through chat logs and recordings using a desktop computer from the early 2000s with a cozy pixel-art style. S4U is one of the more character-driven and narrative heavy games of the bunch. You play as Miki who is a “mouthpiece”, an apparently real-world job where you chat on behalf of clients who have difficulty having challenging conversations. The game takes place across 9 days with dialogue choices impacting how the narrative unfolds. This is one of a few games in the microgenre that involves typing on the keyboard to fill out prescripted dialogue lines, which I found a little odd at first but eventually satisfying.

RELEASE INFO
January 8, 2025
Average Length: 6.5
Price: $13.99

RANKINGS
10 - Gross Revenue
5 - All Time High Concurrent Users (ATH CCU)
13 - All Time High Monthly Twitch Viewers (ATH MTV)

STATS
Gross Revenue: $464K
Reviews: 1,804
Review Score: 90%
ATH CCU: 1,036
ATH MTV: 2,855

Low-Tier Sleepers

Games that made $25K – $250K in estimated gross revenue

FACEMINER

An incremental job sim with resource management elements similar to Universal Paperclips. As with Home Safety Hotline mentioned above, the “It’s the 90s and I’m sitting at a desk just doing my job” concept is well implemented with believable Windows 95 styling and regular emails from your coworker and manager. As the job sim subgenre continues to fracture in really interesting ways, FACEMINER could serve as strong inspiration for developers looking to further expand on the reductionist Computer Use at the office variety.

RELEASE INFO
February 27, 2025
Average Length: 2.5 hours
Price: $7.99

RANKINGS
11 - Gross Revenue
9 - All Time High Concurrent Users (ATH CCU)
10 - All Time High Monthly Twitch Viewers (ATH MTV)

STATS
Gross Revenue: $193K
Reviews: 666
Review Score: 91%
ATH CCU: 257
ATH MTV: 17,807

DEAD LETTER DEPT.

DEAD LETTER DEPT. is a super stylized and slightly eerie job sim typing game. The game has a high contrast analog horror art style with heavy post processing similar to Buckshot Roulette or R.E.P.O. I liked the use of the first person character controller. Walking into the office from your apartment, sitting down at the computer, and concentrating on the CRT monitor sitting on an empty desk in front of a closed window gave me a strong sense of uneasiness. I would encourage developers to consider a similar first person framework especially if you’re setting out to make a horror game within the genre (see also s.p.l.i.t. below).

RELEASE INFO
January 30, 2025
Average Length: 2.5 hours
Price: $14.99

RANKINGS
12 - Gross Revenue
12 - All Time High Concurrent Users (ATH CCU)
7 - All Time High Monthly Twitch Viewers (ATH MTV)

STATS
Gross Revenue: $162K
Reviews: 859
Review Score: 96%
ATH CCU: 149
ATH MTV: 26,525

Winion Virus

A visual-novel horror game where you interact with and care for sentient desktop virtual pets called Winions. It balances cute pixel-art nostalgia with unsettling digital horror. The game has found some success in Korea but has remained niche since its release late last year. The pairing of a child-like aesthetic with horror is unique for the genre. The relatively low sales for Winion Virus illustrates the importance of relatable specificity when it comes to defining the core fantasy of game. When glancing at the screenshots for the game it’s not immediately clear what the concept is, especially when compared to similar desktop horror games like KinitoPet.

RELEASE INFO
December 26, 2024
Average Length: 7 hours
Price: $10.99

RANKINGS
13 - Gross Revenue
13 - All Time High Concurrent Users (ATH CCU)
14 - All Time High Monthly Twitch Viewers (ATH MTV)

STATS
Gross Revenue: $82K
Reviews: 740
Review Score: 95%
ATH CCU: 101
ATH MTV: 158

s.p.l.i.t.

A recently released hacking simulator from Buckshot Roulette developer Mike Klubnika. The game tasks the player, along with a small crew, with navigating a Unix-like command line accessing files and running programs. s.p.l.i.t. really “makes you feel like a hacker” and has a satisfying multi-monitor interaction with a first person perspective. As with Buckshot, the game is, in my opinion, drastically underpriced, but sales in the first few weeks have been solid.

RELEASE INFO
July 24, 2025
Average Length: 1 hour
Price: $2.99

RANKINGS
14 - Gross Revenue
8 - All Time High Concurrent Users (ATH CCU)
11 - All Time High Monthly Twitch Viewers (ATH MTV)

STATS
Gross Revenue: $80K
Reviews: 1,362
Review Score: 92%
ATH CCU: 334
ATH MTV: 14,863

Bottom-Tier Misses

Games that made under $25K in estimated gross revenue. Detailed game stats are not included for this tier.

Sunray OS
The List

Upcoming Releases

A few yet-to-be released Computer Use games that I’m keeping an eye on

No Players Online
DECRYPTO Project
Shutter Story
Aster Initiative
Un-Usual Hotline
lily's world XD
Desktop Explorer

“[It] turned everything we know about game development upside-down,” Kaman says of making Peak. He continues:

At the time we were on the precipice of launching our biggest game ever, Another Crab’s Treasure—an intense 3+ year-long project that burnt a lot of us out. While it was a success, Content Warning [the co-op survival horror game that inspired Peak] was a much bigger one made in MUCH less time.

Another Crab’s Treasure sold an estimated 500K copies while Content Warning sold over 2 million copies. According to Landfall’s press release, Content Warning was developed in just three months, between February and April 2024.

Three months is absurd… I’m jealous too.

Aggro Crab went on to develop the bulk of Peak in one month during a game jam in Korea earlier this year. It sold 5 million copies in its first month.

Now I’m really jealous. But lucky for you, dear reader, I’m just curious enough to put that aside and dig in.

Let’s look at some numbers…

One useful way to compare these games is by calculating how much value each project created relative to the development time and team size it required. I’ll call this metric Monthly Revenue Efficiency (MRE): estimated revenue generated per month per team member. We can do some rough back-of-the-napkin math using sales data from GameDiscoverCo to calculate the MRE for each game. It’s important to note that these are very rough estimates:

Another Crab’s Treasure
Development length: Over 36 months
Core team: ~12 people
MRE: $25K

Content Warning
Development length: 3 months
Core team: ~5 people
MRE: $2M

Peak
Development length: ~4 months
Core team: ~7 people
MRE: $1.7M

From the outside looking in, these three games are all massive successes. It’s every indie developers dream to sell hundreds of thousands let alone millions of copies, so it might seem strange to hear Kaman talk about burnout with 500K copies sold. But I appreciate the honesty. Once you factor in salaries, overhead, and development costs, it’s possible that Aggro Crab made much less profit from Another Crab’s Treasure than they would’ve hoped after three years in development.

Let’s apply the same back-of-the-napkin math with my climbing game released earlier this year (which I’ve written about in detail here and here).

Void Climber
Development time: 12 months
Core team: 3 - 4 depending on the phase
MRE: $7

That “$7” isn’t missing an M at the end. Or even a 0 followed by a K. That’s seven dollars MRE… all in.

Not only that, 12 months is a bit of an understatement. If you include our two cancelled prototypes, the total development time was more like 36 months. For an indie team aiming to make a commercially viable game, this is a complete disaster. So what can we learn from this?

Steam is filled with all sorts of these games, but you wouldn’t know it just casually browsing the store. There are thousands of them buried in the depths of the platform that failed to make even $1,000 in lifetime gross revenue. There’s a quiet, poisonous risk that grows with every month added to your development timeline: scope begins to creep in, returns start to shrink, and you often won’t notice until it’s too late.

Peak and Content Warning bless us with a perfect antidote to this poison: extremely short development timelines. In On Writing, Stephen King describes a similar rigor when writing his first drafts. He says:

I believe the first draft of a book—even a long one—should take no more than 3 months, the length of a season. Any longer and—for me, at least—the story begins to take on an odd foreign feel, like a dispatch from the Romanian Department of Public Affairs, or something broadcast on high-band shortwave during a period of severe sunspot activity.

Describing his regimen in more detail, he says:

I like to get ten pages a day, which amounts to 2,000 words. That’s 180,000 words over a three-month span, a goodish length for a book—something in which the reader can get happily lost, if the tale is done well and stays fresh. On some days those ten pages come easily; I’m up and out and doing errands by eleven-thirty in the morning, perky as a rat in liverwurst. More frequently, as I grow older, I find myself eating lunch at my desk and finishing the day’s work around one-thirty in the afternoon. Sometimes, when the words come hard, I’m still fiddling around at teatime. Either way is fine with me, but only under dire circumstances do I allow myself to shut down before I get my 2,000 words.

Strange Scaffold studio head Xalavier Nelson Jr. also understands the importance of a tight development timeline. In an interview with Thomas Brush, he describes how he and his team made their incremental horror game CLICKOLDING with a budget of just $25K. The game took a month and a half to build, a schedule they were determined to keep from the start. Nelson Jr. says:

If at every step you're like “well [we] have 3 weeks left to make this game [so] we [won’t] choose a solution to any problem that makes it more than 3 weeks”, then it turns out you can ship that game in 3 weeks

He continues:

You can make a game in three days if you build the type of game you can make in three days

So besides making a great game (easy enough), your other herculean task is to make your development process as constrained and efficient as possible. How do you do this?

One way is to identify what Richard Rumelt, in Good Strategy Bad Strategy, calls leverage: your ability to concentrate limited resources at a critical point to create outsized impact.

A good strategy draws power from focusing minds, energy, and action. That focus, channeled at the right moment onto a pivotal objective, can produce a cascade of favorable outcomes. I call this source of power leverage.

Archimedes, one of the smartest people who ever lived, said, “Give me a lever long enough, a fulcrum strong enough, and I’ll move the world.” What he no doubt knew, but did not say, was that to move the earth, his lever would have to be billions of miles long.1 With this enormous lever, a swing of Archimedes’ arm might move the earth by the diameter of one atom. Given the amount of trouble involved, he would be wise to apply his lever to a spot where this tiny movement would make a large difference. Finding such crucial pivot points and concentrating force on them is the secret of strategic leverage.

Knock loose a keystone, and a giant arch will fall. Seize the moment, as James Madison did in 1787, turning colleague Edmund Randolph’s ideas about three branches of government with a bicameral legislature into the first draft of the Constitution, and you just might found a great nation. When the largest computer company in the world comes knocking at your door in 1980, asking if you can provide an operating system for a new personal computer, say, “Yes, we can!” And be sure to insist, as Bill Gates did in 1980, that, after they pay you for the software, the contract still permits you to sell it to third parties. You just might become the richest person in the world.

In general, strategic leverage arises from a mixture of anticipation, insight into what is most pivotal or critical in a situation, and making a concentrated application of effort.

We’re just trying to make a good game, not “found a great nation”. But I promise, Rumelt’s description of leverage is just as applicable to you as it is to Bill Gates. I’ll quote Rumelt again: “Given the amount of trouble involved, [you] would be wise to apply [your] lever to a spot where this tiny movement would make a large difference.”

You must know your team’s skillset intimately, pick a genre you know well, come up with an idea that sticks, define an appealing art style, and then execute excellently. Skillfully applied leverage is how a game built in three months can earn four times more than one that took three years.

On a recent episode of his podcast Dithering, Ben Thompson relates NBA playoff coaching strategies to Apple’s need for a restart after their failed Apple Intelligence launch earlier this year:

When a 7-game series kicks off, game one happens and sometimes the team that was expected to win loses game one. And the big question is: should the coach make an adjustment or do the players just need to play better?

The equivalent in game development is: is your idea bad, or do you just need to execute better?

Recently announced co-op job simulator Roadside Research is a perfect example of how rapid execution on a good idea can, as Rumelt says, “produce a cascade of favorable outcomes.” Hans (I couldn’t find his last name anywhere), the Lead Publishing Producer at Orbo Interactive, details in a thread on X how Roadside Research reached 60K wishlists in one week.

Hans describes their rigorous timeline saying: “Cybernetic Walrus have been developing the game for 2 months now, and limiting scope on what the trailer would show was vital to making it on time.”

I’ll leave you with the team’s one-page proposal for the Roadside Research trailer (then called “Alien Game”), which has surpassed 10 million views across social media platforms.

I want to kick off my Microgenre Reports with a microgenre that’s especially approachable for small teams on a tight budget. Anomaly horror games are concise psychological horror experiences that task players with spotting subtle shifts in eerily familiar settings.

These games don’t require an especially long development process or a massive team of artists or programmers. They often take place in one location, and the gameplay systems and mechanics tend to be extremely straight forward. The reach of some anomaly horror games have been surprisingly wide. One of the defining games, The Exit 8, was recently turned into a movie and shown at Cannes earlier this year where it received an eight-minute standing ovation.

Visually, these games favor a realistic, and sometimes slightly mundane or liminal, first‑person presentation. The core play pattern is spot-the-difference or hidden object: players scan their surroundings and identify “anomalies” or differences. Anomalies are usually identified with a tool or simple in-world yes-or-no prompt or interaction. Anomalies range from subtle (eyes in a poster tracking the player in The Exit 8) to overt (a body dragged across the floor in The Cabin Factory).

This relatively simple gameplay is made to feel thrilling with the addition of tense atmosphere, unexpected environmental shifts, and the occasional jump scare. The best games in the genre lull the player into a state of hyper-focus vigilance. The player searches for a tiny shift in their surroundings knowing that the next big scare could jolt them out of their seat at out at any moment.

There are 7 anomaly horror games that I’ve tracked that surpassed $100K in gross revenue. It is possible the genre has reached its plateau, but the sustained success of the seven-game I’m On Observation Duty series shows underrated future potential. Recent release Who’s at the door? has had a strong first week hitting over 300 reviews and an estimated $40K in gross revenue. It’s on track to potentially hit similar numbers as Dollmare or The Cabin Factory over the next few months.

Other recent releases like Trapped: Family Vacation and Flat 9 have performed well on Twitch with top horror streamer CaseOh playing them on release. But their high view counts have failed to convert to solid sales with both games coming in below $10K in estimated gross revenue.

The content creator appeal of anomaly horror games is potentially limited as they tend to have low replay value. While successful games do still rely on an initial spark from content creators on release, the success seems to stem from their steady circulation through the Steam algorithm rather than on Twitch or YouTube.

Coming up with a strong core fantasy or setting feels especially important, more so than attempting to innovate with the core game mechanics. The spot-the-difference play pattern can also be seen in other recent horror-adjacent demos like No I’m Not A Human or even Quarantine Zone: The Last Check. Although these games are situated within a more Papers Please-like framework.

While the total market volume is relatively low, there’s still sustained interest from fans. Developers might find future success by drawing upon the job simulator/inspection frameworks seen in Dollmare or The Cabin Factory. Both of which were released within the past 10 months and grossed over $225K.

Given the overall revenue potential, it would be risky for teams to spend more than 6 months of development time on a new anomaly horror game. Games in the genre are also slightly under-priced with a median price point of $4.49.

My suggestion: build a strong concept around an asset store environment to cut down on art production time. Add stylization with post process effects and a select few custom-made assets. Test the concept as quickly as possible with the release of a trailer. Expand or contract development time based on reception. Demos are an important marketing beat for anomaly horror games, but pay carefully attention to how much content you include. Consider adding an endless mode to the end of your demo with a limited set of anomalies to maintain a high concurrent user count.

Before we dive into the data I’ll leave you with a relevant quote from Alfred Hitchcock from his conversations with Francois Truffaut on distinction between suspense and surprise. Working to master this tension is an important challenge for developers making games with psychological horror elements.

There is a distinct difference between "suspense" and "surprise," and yet many pictures continually confuse the two. I'll explain what I mean.

We are now having a very innocent little chat. Let's suppose that there is a bomb underneath this table between us. Nothing happens, and then all of a sudden, "Boom!" There is an explosion. The public is surprised, but prior to this surprise, it has seen an absolutely ordinary scene, of no special consequence. Now, let us take a suspense situation. The bomb is underneath the table and the public knows it, probably because they have seen the anarchist place it there. The public is aware the bomb is going to explode at one o'clock and there is a clock in the decor. The public can see that it is a quarter to one. In these conditions, the same innocuous conversation becomes fascinating because the public is participating in the scene. The audience is longing to warn the characters on the screen: "You shouldn't be talking about such trivial matters. There is a bomb beneath you and it is about to explode!"

In the first case we have given the public fifteen seconds of surprise at the moment of the explosion. In the second we have provided them with fifteen minutes of suspense. The conclusion is that whenever possible the public must be informed. Except when the surprise is a twist, that is, when the unexpected ending is, in itself, the highlight of the story.

Let’s dive in…

GENRE OVERVIEW - ANOMALY HORROR
Games Included: 24
Estimated Total Market Volume: $4.57M
Median Review Score: 90%
Average Length: 1 - 2 hours
Meidan Price: $4.49

An important note on revenue estimates: Actual gross revenue figures on Steam are not publicly available. The revenue estimates in this report are sourced from GameDiscoverCo and may differ significantly from real earnings. I include them, along with revenue-based tiers, to give a rough "squint test" of each game's relative success.

Top-Tier Hits

Games that made over $1M in estimated gross revenue

The Exit 8

The Exit 8 is the most popular breakout hit in the genre. It’s short, but deceptively elegant. It immediately drops the player, without context, in a never-ending corridor reminiscent of a Japanese subway station. The game’s infinite hallway draws inspiration from P.T., the legendary teaser for the cancelled Silent Hill game by Kojima Productions. In The Exit 8, the player must consecutively identify the presence of (or lack of) 8 anomalies to complete the game. There are 32 anomalies in total that are randomly sequenced, giving the game a run-based structure. The anomaly identification mechanic is simple and effective: you turn around if you spot an anomaly or continue forward if everything looks normal.

RELEASE INFO
November 29, 2023
Average Length: < 1 hour
Price: $3.99

RANKINGS
1 - Gross Revenue
1 - All Time High Concurrent Users (ATH CCU)
6 - All Time High Monthly Twitch Viewers (ATH MTV)

STATS
Gross Revenue: $2.07M
Reviews: 8,152
Review Score: 93%
ATH CCU: 2,805
ATH MTV: 67,367

I’m on Observation Duty

I wanted to include I’m On Observation Duty in this section even though none of the individual titles surpassed the $1M mark because of how successful and influential the series as a whole as been. I’ve included data for just the first game in this report, but all 7 games together have reached over $2.6M in total estimated gross revenue. I personally find these games to be some of the more unsettling of the bunch. There’s something especially scary about staring intently at CCTV footage of everyday spaces. The anomaly identification mechanic requires the player to select both the room and type of anomaly from a list in a CCTV-style interface. Thematically the game feels reminiscent of found-footage horror movies like Paranormal Activity.

RELEASE INFO
December 14, 2018
Average Length: 2 hours
Average Price: $2.99

RANKINGS
5 - Gross Revenue
10 - All Time High Concurrent Users (ATH CCU)
1 - All Time High Monthly Twitch Viewers (ATH MTV)

STATS
Gross Revenue: $414K
Reviews: 1,875
Review Score: 95%
ATH CCU: 82,297
ATH MTV: 69

Mid-Tier Successes

Games that made $250K – $1M in estimated gross revenue

Platform 8

Kotake Create, developer of The Exit 8, followed up their hit game just 6 months after release with another excellent entry in the genre. This time you’re trapped in a never-ending series of train cars. It features a slightly harder to grasp anomaly “reporting” system where the player must take a specific action for each unique anomaly before continuing to move forward. Part of the challenge of the game is deciphering the rules of each encounter. It performed especially well with Twitch streamers reaching over 70K monthly twitch viewers at its peak.

RELEASE INFO
May 31, 2024
Average Length: < 1 hour
Price: $3.99

RANKINGS
2 - Gross Revenue
2 - All Time High Concurrent Users (ATH CCU)
3 - All Time High Monthly Twitch Viewers (ATH MTV)

STATS
Gross Revenue: $481K
Reviews: 1,957
Review Score: 87%
ATH CCU: 1,885
ATH MTV: 71,159

The Cabin Factory

The Cabin Factory is one of the more unique takes on the genre. It combines a direct and compelling narrative (clear narratives are usually not a focus in the genre) with a job sim core fantasy where the player is tasked with inspecting haunted cabins on a factory floor. The development process was seemingly fairly quick. Most if not all of the assets in the game were acquired on asset stores. The Cabin Factory demonstrates that a strong hook and eerie atmosphere are often more important than a hand-crafted art style for games in the genre.

RELEASE INFO
December 13, 2024
Average Length: 1 hour
Price: $2.99

RANKINGS
3 - Gross Revenue
4 - All Time High Concurrent Users (ATH CCU)
11 - All Time High Monthly Twitch Viewers (ATH MTV)

STATS
Gross Revenue: $478K
Reviews: 2,514
Review Score: 91%
ATH CCU: 537
ATH MTV: 58,059

Shinkansen 0

Prolific Japanese horror game developer Chilla’s Art offers their take on the anomaly horror genre with Shinkansen 0. They apply the familiar never-ending hallway technique to a series of train cars (released just a couple months before Platform 8). The anomalies are a good mix of subtle and surreal. Shinkansen 0 shows that a fast follow strategy can be successful with excellent execution on the art and atmosphere. The game did well with Twitch streamers probably in part due to the name recognition of the developer. This is the only game that I feel is properly priced in the genre. The game had almost 1/3 of the total reviews of The Cabin Factory, but grossed nearly just as much.

RELEASE INFO
March 22, 2024
Average Length: 1 hour
Price: $6.99

RANKINGS
4 - Gross Revenue
3 - All Time High Concurrent Users (ATH CCU)
2 - All Time High Monthly Twitch Viewers (ATH MTV)

STATS
Gross Revenue: $432K
Reviews: 903
Review Score: 85%
ATH CCU: 700
ATH MTV: 75,002

Anomaly Exit

Another fast follow that closely mimics the structure of The Exit 8 and takes place in a subway station. The anomalies tend to be a bit more obvious compared to other games in the genre, but the addition of co-op make it a must-play. The overall execution is solid. Its relative success could be largely due to the fact that it was released just 4 months after The Exit 8.

RELEASE INFO
March 21, 2024
Average Length: 2 hours
Price: $5.99

RANKINGS
6 - Gross Revenue
5 - All Time High Concurrent Users (ATH CCU)
16 - All Time High Monthly Twitch Viewers (ATH MTV)

STATS
Gross Revenue: $271K
Reviews: 793
Review Score: 90%
ATH CCU: 374
ATH MTV: 13,063

Dollmare

You work at a factory making dolls. Some dolls have defects or act on their own accord. You place unaffected dolls on a conveyer belt or toss anomalous dolls in a chute for disposal. The game is a great example of the power of a creepy setting and atmosphere. Carefully inspecting these dolls feels incredibly unsettling even without the presence of overt jump scares. Successful games in the genre typically to fall in one of two categories when it comes to setting: liminal or creepy. Developers of new anomaly horror games should pick a side. An endless mode was recently added to Dollmare, which now feels like a must-have feature for new entrants in the genre.

RELEASE INFO
October 24, 2024
Average Length: 2 hours
Price: $4.99

RANKINGS
7 - Gross Revenue
8 - All Time High Concurrent Users (ATH CCU)
7 - All Time High Monthly Twitch Viewers (ATH MTV)

STATS
Gross Revenue: $225K
Reviews: 1,379
Review Score: 94%
ATH CCU: 138
ATH PMV: 64,415

Low-Tier Sleepers

Games that made $25K – $250K in estimated gross revenue

Who’s at the door?

You’ve been experiencing hallucinations and are being treated at a facility where you’re confined for the next 8 days. Bizarre and disfigured visitors bring you medication at the door. You inspect the visitors through the peephole, looking for changes in their appearance that serve as signs that you’re hallucinating. You decide to either open the door (not hallucinating) or take your medication (hallucinating). The inspection mechanic can feel a a bit confusing at first, but I would put this right up there with The Cabin Factory as one of the best games in the genre due to it’s unique concept and unsettling visual design.

RELEASE INFO
July 18, 2025
Average Length: 2 hours
Price: $4.99

RANKINGS
8 - Gross Revenue
7 - All Time High Concurrent Users (ATH CCU)
4 - All Time High Monthly Twitch Viewers (ATH MTV)

STATS
Gross Revenue: $39K
Reviews: 372
Review Score: 89%
ATH CCU: 322
ATH MTV: 71,098

Ten Bells

Despite the high review score of 97% positive, Ten Bells grossed just $38K. With a peak concurrent users of 54 and an average playtime of less than 1 hour, the game seems to have been a little too short to really gain traction on Steam. The Steam algorithm favors games with higher CCU (concurrent users) stats. Game length is something important to keep in mind for developers of new games in the genre.

RELEASE INFO
August 30, 2024
Average Length: < 1 hour
Price: $4.99

RANKINGS
9 - Gross Revenue
11 - All Time High Concurrent Users (ATH CCU)
17 - All Time High Monthly Twitch Viewers (ATH MTV)

STATS
Gross Revenue: $38K
Reviews: 375
Review Score: 97%
ATH CCU: 54
ATH MTV: 12,286

False Dream

This turned out to be one of my favorites. False Dream is set in a small Japanese apartment that has a liminal and slightly surreal feel. The anomaly reporting mechanic involves taking a picture of the object or area that you think has changed. I found some of the scares to be genuinely surprising. There are a whopping 81 anomalies in total with a save system that tracks how many anomalies you’ve found across your different “runs”. If the game were properly priced (at least $4.99) it might have been able to catch a spark on Steam and find its way into the $250K+ revenue category.

RELEASE INFO
January 16, 2024
Average Length: < 1 hour
Price: $1.99

RANKINGS
10 - Gross Revenue
6 - All Time High Concurrent Users (ATH CCU)
9 - All Time High Monthly Twitch Viewers (ATH MTV)

STATS
Gross Revenue: $35K
Reviews: 405
Review Score: 96%
ATH CCU: 336
ATH MTV: 61,522

Bottom-Tier Misses

Games that made under $25K in estimated gross revenue. Detailed game stats are not included for this tier.

False Mall
Shift 87
Floor 9
Office After Hours (recently released)
Trapped: Family Vacation
Overtime Anomaly (recently released)
Route8
Kyoto Anomaly (recently released)
My Last Appointment
Everloop
No.8 High School (recently released)
Flat 9 (recently released)

You pull into your driveway, press the garage door opener, park your car, and set your keys down on the side table. You grab a Coke Zero from the fridge and head down to the basement.

You boot up your computer and turn on your three 32-inch monitors carefully placed side by side at just the right angle. You open Steam, launch Euro Truck Simulator 2, and set out for a long night of deliveries.

You were made for this, you’ve got just the right rig.

Euro Truck Simulator 2 is part of a genre of games on Steam categorized as hobby or job simulators. These are first-person PC games focused on a single job or activity. Most involve running a store or small business and checking off a growing list of tasks.

Think of any non-desk job and there’s probably a simulator for it: Supermarket Simulator, Parcel Simulator, PowerWash Simulator, Fast Food Simulator, Liquor Store Simulator, Car Dealer Simulator, Storage Hunter Simulator, Recycling Center Simulator, Farming Simulator, etc.

When I tell people about these games who are unfamiliar with the genre, their immediate reaction is shock, usually followed by curiosity, and sometimes a bit of disgust. A critical reader might consider the job simulator genre yet another twisted example of what Jean Baudrillard called hyperreality in Simulacra and Simulation. The simulation replaces the original, and eventually becomes the more meaningful experience. Or they might connect the genre to David Graeber’s concept of Bullshit Jobs. With the proliferation of “fake email jobs,” workers have become increasingly alienated from their own labor. The purpose of work hides beneath layers and layers of abstraction. At least the simulated job has clear goals and tight feedback loops.

I think these imagined but familiar critiques miss an important point. A lot of games in the genre are genuinely fun and well designed. And their absurdity is often part of the appeal. The irony of coming home from a day job to play a game simulating an entirely different job (or in some cases the same job) isn’t lost on players.

Rather than treating these games as side effects, or even causes, of societal ills through a postmodern media theory lens, I think it’s worth exploring a simpler theory. Some people genuinely enjoy things that others find boring, confusing, or even repulsive.

After I dropped out of college I got a job at Urban Outfitters where I came up with outfits for the mannequins to wear on the men’s floor, but I was surprised to find that I enjoyed the task of repeatedly folding hundreds of pieces of clothing just as much. writes about this in relation to the phenomenon of false consensus effect.

Some of you guys wake up at 5am to make almond croissants, some of you watch golf on TV, and some of you are willing to drive an 80,000-pound semi truck full of fidget spinners across the country. There are people out there who like the sound of rubbing sheets of Styrofoam together, people who watch 94-part YouTube series about the Byzantine Empire, people who can spend an entire long-haul flight just staring straight ahead. Do you not realize that, to me, and to almost everyone else, you are all completely nuts?

No, you probably don’t realize that, because none of us do. We tend to overestimate the prevalence of our preferences, a phenomenon that psychologists call the “false consensus effect”. This is probably because it’s really really hard to take other people’s perspectives, so unless we run directly into disconfirming evidence, we assume that all of our mental settings are, in fact, the defaults. Our idiosyncrasies may never even occur to us.

These job simulator games are situated within a long history of simulation games going back to Microsoft Flight Simulator in 1982 and the various tycoon and sims games in the 90s. In more recent years, both big, well-funded developers and small indie teams consisting of just a few people are making job simulator games.

Publishers like PlayWay have found massive commercial success in the job simulator genre by taking an extremely optimized approach to the development process. They’ll often put up a Steam page or an early demo to see what the reception is from players, and use that data to decide whether to fund full development. Some players find this practice off-putting or straight up scammy.

Both GameDiscoverCo and How To Market a Game have published nuanced takes on this approach. And WIRED magazine published an article in 2021 titled The Polish Simulator Company Gamers Love to Hate.

Some indie developers and industry critics are quick to dismiss rising genres as passing fads. They sigh when “yet another roguelike deckbuilder” demo drops on Steam. They obsess over originality while gamers are eager to buy a slight variant of a game in a sub-sub-genre they already love.

The core game mechanics in many big budget AAA games often boil down to running across a large island doing somewhat tedious tasks disguised as epic quests. These tasks feel engaging because they’re supported by layers of narrative, world-building, and a sleek sci-fi or fantasy theme. In contrast, the tasks in job simulator games are direct and honest, there’s no layers of abstraction.

One extreme case of this honesty can be seen in TrickShot Simulator. The game is essentially a simulator version of the living room trick shot videos you can find on TikTok. The game features listed on Steam sell the player on the “time-consuming masterpieces” with trick shots that can take “minutes or even hours to accomplish.” This is peak content for Twitch streamer Northernlion, who ranted for hours on end until he completed all the stages.

There’s a gut reaction to label these types of games as slop or brain rot. Critics will point at the unlit environment art, asset-pack props, seemingly recycled game mechanics. But I think they’d be missing the point. There’s meditative bliss to be found in between the shelves of Supermarket Simulator.

Northernlion’s rant from the TrickShot Simulator stream embedded above sums it up nicely:

This is not brain rot, this is zen. You don't get it.

Something being boring doesn't make it brain rot. Something being exciting but having no actual quality to it is brain rot. This is boring. This is brain exercise. This is brain genesis.

This is so much less of a cognitohazard than like an Undertale let’s play. This content has you guys typing like real motherfuckers in chat. You're typing with emotion. You're typing “good luck.” You're typing “I can't watch this shit.” You're typing “I can't bear to be a part of this experience anymore.”

You're feeling something. You're feeling something human, man!

When you watch an Undertale let’s play all you're typing is like “hey if you go back to Snuffy, Snuffy has a new shirt that you could wear that would increase the size of your hitbox when you get into combat with Sans.”

That shit is not real, man! This is real!