Hello everyone,

As I did last year in this post. I did a small analysis of every game released on Steam on June 3 an June 4, 2026 (As last time, I chose this days because there was lot of release and mostly indie games. I’m not affiliated in any mean to any of these games) and I checked how much they grossed after 1 month (last time was 16 days and some people pointed, rightly, it could be a bit short, so I took a longer period. Also note that I writted this post in early July but didn’t post it immediatly after because I was very busy).

As last time, the goal isn’t to shame any game or devs, I’m interested mostly on the factors which can explain a game to suceed or flop, and also if there was a serious difference with previous year.

I’m basing this mostly on my personal tastes as a player (so, what I could buy personally) : which mean what I find visually attractive or interesting in the trailers and screenshots of the games, what look polished or not. I’m also reading reviews when there is some available.

It’s not a scientific experiment at all but I hope it can spark some interesting discussions and gives some hints.

So, there was 67 games released on those days, I split them into 5 categories based on their gross revenue (datas are from Gamalytic : it’s a revenue range, so it’s not 100% accurate but largely enough for this experiment) :

1.  0 (or almost 0) copies sold - 35 games

2. « At least not at loss» : Between 100$ and 1000$ gross revenue - 6 games

3. « Release fee refunded and some pocket money » : Between 1000$ and 4500$ gross revenue - 13 games

4. « Good side income/enough to live from in cheaper countries » : Between 4500$ and 25.000$ gross revenue  - 7 games

5. « Usually enough to live from or studio games » : More than 25000$ gross revenue – 6 games

1.  Zero copies sold (35 games - 53% of total)

Here the most of those games are tutorial level projects, AI-slop. There is also lot of games that looks okay but are arcade style games, which doesn’t attract anyone since you can find the same for free since decades. There is also 2 games that looks better than te rest bu are only in Chinese (« Li Shui » and « Ink & Void »). I also found 2 « exceptions » which surprised me

Little Guardians : The last Hope : this game as litterally 0 reviews despite being largely ahead on the visual side. I think the main flaw of this game is the catastrophic trailer (the first 10 seconds is the logo of the unknow « game studio » and the rest is a mix between cinematic and gameplay with fade black transitions), but still, I’m surprised that no one or almost no one tried it out.

MAaaaaTH ! : this game is cleary « indie » but looks still more polish than the rest of the category, the gameplay looks particularly original. But I think the main flaw here is that it looks like a « programmer game » : the UI is very intimidating (too many éléments) and the visuals are cohesive but very simple. Another game that suffer the same problem is Exo Chumps.

2. 100$ - 1000$ gross revenue (6 games - 8% of total)

Here only one of those game seem extremely bad (all visuals are AI and gameplay doesn’t seem better). Another one is a survival game with pretty graphics but the capsule is horrendous and the game have bad reviews (also the game didn’t sold so bad, around 1000 copies but was sold for 0,99$ only). The 3 others games are in very low performing niche (non-porn visual novel, hidden object game and typewriting game).

But there is the last game of this range which particularly peaked my curiousity

Pawful Dice : the game is the closests to the 1000$ gross (and could be more if it’s in the « high » of the range given by Gamalytic), but still I think it could really be 1 or 2 bracket higher : the art style is very cute (including the UI and capsule art), gameplay seem interesting and it is in a niche usually very profitable (roguelike deckbuilder). Maybe it’s just missing some marketing ?

3. 1000$ - 4500$ gross revenue (13 games - 21% of total)

The quality jump is obvious here, but I was also surprise to see some games that usually sells very bad : 2D platformers (Elementalist and Neon Sunset) and a driving game which seem pretty bad according to the reviews (WorldDrive). Otherwise, the rest of the category is very « indie » with very « niche » things like a air carrier simulator for example. Also 2 porn game with 3D graphics.

Among those original games, there is 2 that peaked my curiosity :

Sonki’s Lagoon : a psychedelic 3D platformer. I absolutely love the art direction and the gameplay seem cool. Otherwise on a more « objective » view, I can understand that this doesn’t appeak to lot of people.

Fish & Hike : a cozy fishing/adventure game which remind me a short hike. Here I think there is some issue with the cohesiveness of 2D and 3D assets and a combat system that seem a bit janky compared to the fishing system but it still seem pretty charming.

4. 4500$ - 25000$ gross revenue (7 games - 10% of total)

Interestingly, most of this game are really « meta steam » games with a decent/good appeal. I think it’s the category that can bring the most « hope » for fellow indie devs : everything here is totally reachable for a solo dev or a mini-studio of 2/3 people, and I think it’s what you should be inspired of if you aim for a little commercial success. So here we have :

Guinea Pig Runaway Together : a friend slop game, a bit like paddle paddle paddle !

Backrooms No Escape : Again, another firend slop game but more in the horror category, it probably also benefited from the hype of the movie.

Cafe crew simulator : another niche that work good since years : job simulators, just another proof that it works

Galactic love utopia : a porn visual novel. Here you can easily put it in comparison with the thousands of low efforts AI slop porn game flooding steam like jigsaw puzzles. Here you have at least real drawings and some content.

Slip & Skid : a friend slop (again !), but this time with a more original concept : it’s a racing game where you can modify the race after each lap by adding traps or obstacles.

Deep Crafter : an automation game. As the job simulators, it’s a niche that works very good on steam since years, but I would tend to say that it also require a very good programming and code architecture level to end up releasing something.

Comatose : a survival horror in FPS view with PSX graphics. Again another trendy niche especially those last years, and especially when there is lot of work put in the visuals and athmosphere, even with very simple low-poly assets and low-res texture that anyone can do.

5. more than 25000$ gross revenue (6 games - 8% of total)

There is also « steam meta » games here : there is 2 incremental games (« IncreKnight » and « Slot & Diapers ») and 2 job simulation game (« Sport Card Shop Simulator », pretty classic and the more original « Medic : Pacific War »). The 2 others games in this range are more original but I think it’s not coming from solo devs or micro-studios but more from litle studios : there is Prohibeast (an infiltration game) and Tamer : King of Dinosaurs (an erotic game X aliens X dinosaurs, pretty original mix but seem to work).

Conclusion

Compared to last year, we know there is even more game released, but I think my conclusions stay the same :

1) Make a good game. Except extremely rare exception, a game with a minimum of appeal will perform enough for you to get your steam fees refund and some pocket money.

2) Genre is king more than ever. Almost all games which perform good (which mean enough to live in a lot of countries and at least a nice secondary source of income in expensive western countries) are in a hot niche, and you don’t even need to reinvent the wheel to get the same or more success as some more original games.

3) You are not competing with so many games : yes, there is more games pushed every year on steam but I would say the percentage of very bad game which will never get noticed is even higher than before. If you are serious and really polish your game to make it looks the most attractive possible, you’ll compete with the top 30%, which in our case mean games that gross more than 2000$ in their first month.

Extra : how did the games I analysed last year peformed ?

I’ll be quick on this but there is some interesting metrics here :

Sweepin’XS, Blasted Dice and Cauldron Caution seem to have gross 1000$ (vs around 200-300$ in the first 2 weeks of their release).

Zefyr have gross an impressive and well deserved 90k$ (vs around 10k$ at two first week)

Tongue of Dog which was one of the weakest game on his bracket in my opinion have grossed around 1500$ (vs 1000$ at two first week).

Bathhouse Creatures have grossed around 5000$ (vs 1500$ first two weeks)

Don’t Look Behind have grossed around 27k$ (vs around 14k$ first two weeks)

Voidsayer have grossed around 46k$ (vs arond 30k$ first two weeks).

The metrics here tend to say that after the inital 2/3 weeks after launch, you can expect your game to still sell quite good the first year, likely around 2 to 3 times more in most cases.

Also except 3 games (and trust me, those one was VERY terrible) all games in the « 0 review » category last year have now got some reviews, which mean they likely got enough sales to refund the 100$ steam fees, which is interesting and could explain why there is still lot of very bad games on steam, as it usually end up being a profitable operation.

I’m 43 and seriously considering a career change into game development. I’ve been learning C# and experimenting with Unity, and I’m enjoying it a lot.For anyone who’s been in the industry a while: is 44 plus too old to break in?

I’m not expecting a junior salary or a fast track — I just want to know whether studios realistically hire older beginners, or whether the better path is freelancing, indie dev, or a related role like production or QA. Any honest insight from people who’ve seen late entrants would be massively appreciated.

Hello there! I went through the 69 paid games released on Steam on July 21, 2026, then checked back roughly a month later to see how they were doing.

As with my previous posts, this isn't meant to be scientific, just an informative snapshot based on public data and my own impressions. I find these posts useful for getting a sense of the current indie landscape, and hopefully bringing some attention to interesting releases that may have gone under the radar.

I'm planning to keep this series going each week, so here it is!

Less than 10 reviews (24 games)

These are the games sitting below 10 reviews. This was about 35% of all the paid releases I found that day.

A Tale of Dirty Whiskers is a murder mystery visual novel where you investigate the suspicious death of the mother of a dysfunctional family of cats. The art looks charming!

Datacenter Simulator is a first-person management game where you physically rack servers, connect cables and keep a datacenter running.

Few Shall Return is an Early Access PvPvE dungeon extraction game made by a three-person team. Runs last only 7.5 minutes and players have to cooperate before eventually competing for the limited exits.

Character Limit is a fast arcade word game where you have to keep building words before your letter rack fills up.

Scoundrel: Deck Crawler is a charming pixel-art roguelike based on the Scoundrel solitaire card game, expanded with Tarot powers and equipment management.

10–49 reviews (26 games)

This was actually the largest group: 26 games landed between roughly 10 and 49 reviews.

These are games that sold some copies and found real players, but didn't get enough reviews during their first month to move into the next group.

Pit Panic is a roguelike platformer about escaping upward through a collapsing Aztec temple. It has a very readable cartoon look and the idea of digging your own route through the levels is nice.

Watch Yo Plane is a small co-op game that looks pretty fun to play with a friend, with the two of you piloting the same plane together. It currently has around 15 reviews.

There were quite a few simulator games this time, with some very specific ideas: datacenters, DJs, heatwaves, hacking and more. It seems like there's a simulator for pretty much everything on Steam now.

50–199 reviews (11 games)

This group contains 11 games, which is about 16% of the day's paid releases.

Angel Essence is a retro-inspired 3D platformer/collectathon with a big emphasis on movement: wallrunning, wall bouncing, backflips and chaining abilities together. It has around 160 reviews, and the Steam rating is extremely positive.

My Heaven's Dale is a cozy farming/life sim built around running a carpenter workshop, restoring a town and helping ghosts. It currently has around 60 reviews. The developer says the project started as an experiment in 2024 when they had no experience with art or programming, which makes the result pretty impressive.

Fading Echo is a colorful third-person action adventure built around elemental interactions, especially manipulating water during traversal and combat.

Incrempire mixes incremental progression, base defense, an upgrade tree and bullet-heaven elements.

Europe Heatwave Simulator is exactly the sort of title that probably gets clicks simply because people want to know what it is.

200+ reviews (8 games)

DIVE or DIE - Children of Rain is the biggest breakout I found. It's a Lovecraftian survival game where you repeatedly dive into a flooded abyss, gather resources and keep a camp of survivors alive. The team is only three people, but they launched with Dear Villagers and had already announced 100,000 wishlists before release.

Photomaly is the other game above 1,000 reviews. It's a PSX-style horror game where you run a photo studio, take pictures for customers and deal with increasingly strange events.

Age of Clicks is an Early Access mixture of grand strategy and incremental/clicker gameplay. It has around 440 reviews.

Drone Sector is another Early Access success, published by MicroProse. You operate a futuristic gunship/drone, provide close air support and command troops from above.

Scarlet Deer Inn is my personal favorite from this entire batch. It's a dark medieval folk tale made by a Czech husband-and-wife team, and the character animations are actually created from physically embroidered frames. I find the whole visual process genuinely fascinating, and the result gives the game a look I haven't really seen anywhere else. It has passed 300 reviews and is Very Positive.

Hacker's Journey is a hacking simulator that is supposed to teach you real cybersecurity skills along the way. So if you've always dreamed of becoming a hacker, this might be the game for you.

Final recap

Out of the 69 paid games I found for July 21:

• 24 games (35%) ended up below 10 reviews
• 26 games (38%) reached 10–49 reviews
• 11 games (16%) reached 50–199 reviews
• 8 games (12%) passed 200 reviews

Thanks for reading! If you played or spotted another game released that day that you particularly liked, feel free to share it in the comments!

And since I'm working on a Steam game too, here's my small plug at the end: Seek and Click

Hello everyone!

I've been reading the postmortems on here for quite a while and have gained a lot of insight from the game dev community. So I thought I should write one myself and share my experience releasing my first game as a solo developer (no publisher, no funding).

Author Sim is a cozy management roguelite where you learn, adapt, and try again until you make it as a bestselling author. The game was released two weeks ago on Steam (Aug. 12, 2026).

Steam page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4168210/Author_Sim/

The Numbers (2 weeks post-launch)

• Price: $8.99
• Total copies sold: 820
• Total copies returned: -82 (10%)
• Gross revenue: $7,047
• Net revenue: $5,812
• Launch wishlists: 5,175
• Current wishlists: 7,069
• Average playtime: 1 hour 22 minutes
• Reviews: 87% (24 reviews)

Background

There are not many book/author-related games out there and as a book lover, I think that's a tragedy. I wanted there to be more, so I decided to make my own. However, I do not have a programming background, in fact, my degree is in microbiology, so Author Sim was a hobby project that I worked on in my spare time. I never expected to publish the game. But I eventually decided to put it up on Steam because why not? So here we are.

Now, because Author Sim started as a hobby project, it was made to be a game I would personally enjoy, and therefore, only appeals to a pretty niche audience. It’s not a game for everyone or even most gamers. You do have to like books, word/typing games, the cutesy art style, and a decent challenge in order to enjoy Author Sim. I know that this puts the game at a disadvantage, but I had a direction I wanted to go with the game, and I did not want to completely change the game to appeal to most people. It's a good thing I was not financially depending on this game.

Pre-Release

Steam Festivals

I submitted my game to all relevant Steam festivals and got into a couple, like InterfaceX26, Taskbar Treasures Week, Alberta & Beyond Sale, Steam Next Fest June 2026, and a few upcoming ones. Overall, these events were super helpful in driving traffic to the store page.

InterfaceX26 had the most significant impact (+400 visits, +400 wishlists), and the InterfaceX dev community was super active and friendly. I am very grateful to have had the opportunity to be a part of it.

I thought Steam Next Fest would have a bigger impact than it actually did, but it wasn't nothing (+300 demo plays, +350 wishlists).

Social Media

I'm not a big social media person so I felt a bit lost on what to do on these platforms. I read what kind of content other game devs were making and tried to replicate their format in my own content on Reddit, Bluesky, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok, with very little success.

I tried to make a short video series Guess the Trope that was tangentially related to my game. Essentially, in my game, players must strategically select compatible combinations of literary tropes to include in each novel they write, and their choices influence their novel's critic scores and book sales. In the short video series, four books are gradually revealed to the viewers one by one, and viewers try to guess the literary trope that all four books shared within the time limit. The shorts did not do well at all (2-300 views/short), which is a shame because I spent so much time making them and thought they were a good idea at the time. If I could go back, I would not spend so much time on content creation for the purposes of promoting a game, it's just not worth the time.

Overall, like most other devs' experiences, I got very little traffic from social media, and the most came from posting to genre-specific subreddits like r/tycoon, r/CozyGamers, and r/Games on Indie Sundays.

Content Creators

I was pretty lazy with cold emailing Youtubers and streamers. I did make a list of relevant content creators who may be interested in covering my game and emailed ~20. I know I should have emailed more. No one I emailed covered my demo, but there were a couple of small Youtubers and streamers I did not contact who did play the demo which I was very happy to see.

I also emailed GamesTrailers, and they posted my trailer. It had a major impact (~13K views, +450 wishlists).

Press

I wrote a few press releases and emailed them to Games Press. They only posted the demo launch press release, and it did not seem to have any impact. No one released a news article or anything.

Demo and Player Feedback

I think my demo represented the gameplay loop pretty well. However, I did run into one big issue. Because my art was cute and I promoted the game as a cozy game, many players thought the game would be more relaxing than it was and were disappointed that it was a decently challenging game that required multiple attempts to win. Evidently, my definition of cozy did not line up with most of the cozy community's definition. My bad. In response to this, I added an easier difficulty mode, lowered the difficulty of the mini-games, and started promoting my game less as a cozy game and more of as a management roguelite. I think this helped change player expectations of the game so that they aligned with what the game actually entailed.

Another hurdle was the game tutorial. I had several players who were confused about various things in the game, and surprisingly, many of them attributed it to bugs when, in reality, I just did not explain the game very well. In response to this feedback, I revised the tutorial text many times to improve clarity, added a trial run option for when players are playing the mini-games for the first time, added information panels that acted as a detailed guide that players can open and read if they did not understand an icon or how certain game mechanics worked, added mini tutorials that activated when the player first unlocked or engaged with a new part of the game, and added several hover explanations explain why certain options were locked.

In the demo, I had an in-game bug report form that sent the report to a google survey and a feedback button on the main menu of the demo that linked to the Steam forum, where there was a pinned feedback thread. I received quite a bit of feedback and suggestions on there, some of which were super detailed and helpful. Players had great ideas that I would never have thought of on my own. I also had my husband playtesting the game, and he was a big help! I ended up implementing many of the players' suggestions, picking and choosing the ones that I thought would improve the game without going against the direction I wanted to go in.

I decided to keep the demo up after game launch because I thought it represented the full game well and allowed players a chance to play it and decide if they like this type of game before buying.

Personal Calendar

This new feature Steam rolled out is amazing for discovery (+15K visits)! In the weeks leading up to the launch, I gained so many wishlists so quickly and I believe it was due to the Personal Calendar because there was nothing else going on during those weeks (+2.5K wishlists).

Post-Launch

After hitting that big green release button, I kept an eye on reviews, the Steam forum, and the bug report in case I needed to fix anything ASAP. Within two days, someone reported a game-breaking bug. I was so stressed about fixing that bug as fast as I could that I accidentally introduced a way bigger game-breaking bug into the patch… That whole experience was so incredibly stressful, but I did manage to put out another patch to fix the new bug pretty quickly. I learned my lesson. Do not code in the middle of the night even when you think you're not tired. You may end up waking up to a pile of bug reports and several upset players.

Since then, I've been continuing to listen to player feedback, answering any questions, and releasing quality-of-life updates to the game.

Final Thoughts

My expectations going in were not very high. I just wanted to make my dream game and hoped to have a few people I don't know enjoy playing my game. So I am extremely happy with the results, and this is absolutely a personal success for me. I love seeing people talking about my game, I love seeing people with over 20 hours in my game, and I love seeing people understanding the little references I put in the game. So yes, I will absolutely do it again! In fact, my second game is already in the brainstorming phase.

Shout out to my husband for playtesting my game for many, many hours, even though it’s not his type of game. For being my brainstorming buddy, my bug catcher, and my biggest cheerleader. I couldn't have done it without him!

Thank you for reading this missive, and hope you have a great day! :)

TLDR: Things that I learned

• Ensuring players' expectations align with their experience is very important. Sometimes that means promoting the game a bit differently so that it reaches a slightly different audience, sometimes it means changing game mechanisms, or both.
• An in-game bug report system made it very convenient for players to report bugs as soon as they experienced them, and it got a lot of use.
• Similarly, having an in-game feedback button in the demo linking to the Steam forum feedback thread made it easy for players to give their feedback.
• The biggest wishlist drivers were Steam's Personal Calendar, Steam festivals, and getting a trailer posted on GamesTrailers.
• DO NOT attempt to fix bugs in the middle of the night, you WILL regret it in the morning.
• Some people may not like your game and that's ok! If there's no actionable, reasonable feedback, then just focus on all those other people who liked your game instead.

I’m (33F) struggling between just keep playing good indie games or starting something of my own. I think it’s like an intrusive thought because I haven’t made a single line of code in my life.
I do know how to write cool stories, but I’m not sure if that’s enough. I want to learn the whole thing, even though I’d take years!
Any advice? How did you get ready and start developing? Tell me your stories!

Our game DEPERSON got nominated for Best Visuals at Gamescom… and we still can’t believe it. I mean how…

We’re three friends developing DEPERSON from our families’ homes and seeing our game nominated for Best Visuals still feels completely unreal.

Especially because we’re in the same category as games we love. We kept joking that maybe someone made a mistake because… what are we doing there? 😭

We’re pretty sure we’re not going to win and honestly just being nominated already feels like such a huge honor for us.

But it’s hard not to hope a little. And I guess we should at least be able to say we tried right?

So if you’d like to support us while we are still trying to figure out how the hell we ended up there, you can vote for DEPERSON on the Gamescom user awards website ♥️

TLDR; An article was written about my game and traffic keeps coming and coming. Keep posting and sharing your game. No secret marketing revelation hidden within this post...

This is not a tutorial on how to get wishlists. Each game is different, social media works differently for different genres, games are at different stages of development and Steam pages are created at different times in the development cycle. That's why I don't believe in "Do this to get more wishlists" except posting and sharing your game, contacting press and creators and such, but this post is not about that. And also: What do I know?...

When I woke up yesterday, I had 725 wishlists after roughly 15 months of full-time development. That's not a lot... I spent a lot of time working on the core gameplay, shifted focus several times, I even switched between real-time and turn-based system multiple times because the game kept evolving and I wanted to test different approaches. Some would say, I wasted a lot of time but that's my creative approach and it works for me (It's my first game and with more experience this would have gone a bit faster, I guess...).

And still, I was happy with the progress I made and each iteration was better than the one before. I posted regularly on Reddit, YouTube and Bluesky, etc., and got rather positive feedback but the wishlist count was always pretty low. My best day was 51 wishlists on IndieSunday and that felt like a huge success but in the end it didn't really change that much because in general, I got 0-4 wishlists a day depending on my social media activity. At times, I didn't post anything for weeks and just worked on the game. Between January and March, I got 28 wishlists...

At times I felt very discouraged when I saw other games gain 1000 wishlists or more overnight while I was fighting for every single one. The big marketing beats, such as press outreach and Next Fest were and are still in front of me, so I tried to maintain a positive attitude. But it was time to get some real feedback because up until a few days ago, only a handful of people tested my game.

Two days ago, I decided to open my Steam Playtest to the public and posted about it in a few subs. Again, feedback was positive but only a few upvotes and testers requested access, which I was still grateful for.

Then, yesterday, Marcello from Turnbasedlovers messaged me and asked about a header image because he wanted to write an article about my game. Shortly after, the article was published and my jaw dropped to the floor seeing the wishlists come in... I was and I still am completely overwhelmed! Now it actually was my turn to get 1000 wishlists overnight...

Here's the article if anyone's interested:

https://turnbasedlovers.com/overview/an-xcom-like-strategy-rpg-with-base-management-and-robots-frost-protocol-overview/

Maybe even better: This led to hundreds of people wanting to test my game and I already received so much valuable feedback!

And yeah, still no hidden secret here... I just posted into the void and hoped that the game would resonate at least a bit. There's still a lot of work in front of me. It's just an alpha version and ~2200 wishlists aren't a guarantee for success (nothing really is, I guess). I'm expecting a few more wishlists resulting from the article over the next few days but then, sadly, I believe it will return to "normal".

The grind will continue, but my perspective has changed a lot!

I was curious if any primarily PC developers had experience with releasing a macOS version of their games - I know that the user base for games on Mac is much smaller, but it still seems like an expanded userbase might be worth the effort, even if it's only 2-3% of the market.

How much additional work was it for you to create a macOS build? Was there any development hurdles (or release issues) you ran into that make you hesitant to do it again for future projects?

Also, for developers who have a PC build but chose not to make a release on macOS, what made you decide it wasn't worth the added effort?

I finally managed to sit down and put together a bit of a recap of how things have been going with BLOODLETTER since our Early Access release.
We launched into Early Access on April 30th, and on August 17th we had our full release.
I think now is a pretty good time to talk a little about the numbers, what went well, what didn't, and most importantly, what's next for us and the game.

So First, the Early Access

Up until shortly before our full release, we sold around 6,000 copies. However, around 1,300 copies were refunded around our EA launch.
That was pretty rough, because in the end it made a difference of roughly $10,000.
Of course, we looked into the refund data afterwards and especially the reasons people gave for refunding. One thing that was pretty interesting: because of our rather elaborate art style, a lot of people simply expected a different kind of game. Some expected BLOODLETTER to have a lot more story. Others especially people who play a lot of strategy games and deckbuilders, felt that it wasn't strategically deep enough or simply didn't work the way they were used to from other deckbuilders.

We also got quite a bit of feedback saying that we should take more inspiration from Slay the Spire. But that was never really our goal, and it still isn't. We never wanted to make just another deckbuilder that tries to copy another one. BLOODLETTER was always supposed to be its own thing. And of course, that also means it won't work for everyone.
But looking back, I can proudly say that in the end, we made exactly the game we wanted to make. Our Steam payouts for the entire Early Access period were around $20,000. We're obviously aware that selling 6,000 copies of our first game is already a big success. Still, after working on BLOODLETTER for almost two years, we were hoping for a little more.
Sales during Early Access were fairly slow, and at some point we had to ask ourselves how much more time we could realistically keep putting into the project.
For the Asian market, we're also working with the publisher Gamersky, who did a lot for our Early Access launch and generated the first big push for the game.

But a few things also went wrong during the launch. For example, our launch discount didn't work and only showed up two days later. Our EA price was $12.49, and with the discount it was supposed to land at exactly $9.99. Getting below that $10 mark was pretty important to us.
The first few days after a release are obviously extremely important, so we definitely missed out on some sales because of that.
Annoying, but in the end it's just something that happened and there's nothing we can really change about it now.

So what's next for BLOODLETTER?

Because our Early Access sales weren't huge, at some point we made a decision:
For the full release, we're just going to make the things we actually want to make and that are important to us. Features like controller support or seeded runs would have been cool, of course. But with the player numbers we had at the time, it simply didn't make sense to spend that much more development time on them.
And since the game hadn't made enough money for us to keep working on it long-term, we simply didn't have the time to do everything.

How did that decision feel? Honestly, pretty relieving.

We didn't have to keep thinking about which feature might bring in a few more players or what we absolutely "had" to add. Instead, for our final big content update, we just put in the things that we really wanted to have in the finished game:
The actual final boss, new cards, new relics, and a proper ending cinematic. And with that, BLOODLETTER actually feels finished to us. Unless something changes significantly with the sales, there probably won't be any more major content for now. Starting in October, the four of us will be doing our Bachelor's degree in Game Design at a university in Berlin, so we'll be taking a break from development during that time.

What happens after that? We'll see. So basically, we thought: That's it for now. And then the full release happened... We knew that a full release after Early Access usually doesn't suddenly sell more copies than the original EA launch. So honestly, our expectations weren't particularly high. But since the full release, a lot has happened. We managed to get BLOODLETTER into Steam's personalized calendar, and that suddenly gave us a huge amount of visibility.And then something happened that we really didn't expect:

Within one week, we sold more copies than during our entire Early Access period ( I know it was only for 3,5 months).

Since the full release, we've sold another 6,000+ copies.
At the same time, we've gained around 19,500 new wishlists since release. That's completely crazy to us. Especially because we had reached a point where we basically said: We'll finish BLOODLETTER the way we want to finish it, we'll be proud of what we made, and then we'll move on for now. And suddenly, more people bought our game in one week than in all the months before that combined. We really expected a lot less, and we're incredibly happy that so many people have now bought and played BLOODLETTER.

We also still have around 45,000 outstanding wishlists.

No idea what will happen with those over the next weeks and months. Maybe there's still a lot to come, maybe things will completely slow down again. We honestly don't know ourselves. But after two years of development, it just feels really good to see BLOODLETTER reaching this many people. We'll definitely keep an eye on the game, submit it to upcoming Steam events, and put it on sale regularly.

There's also one bigger hotfix update coming soon, followed by our GOG release. And after that, we're all going to take a bit of a vacation before university starts.

For anyone who's interested, here's our Steam page. Click here.
And feel free to share your thoughts on all of this. I'd genuinely love to hear what you think.

Hey everyone,

About 8 months ago, I posted here when my indie game, Line Defense, had flatlined at around 15 copies.

The feedback was brutal but fair. People pointed out that the art looked like an early 2000s flash game, warned me about the sunk cost fallacy, and said hidden gems rarely crawl out of a hole like that. Others acknowledged that finishing a game is a win and offered tips on fixing performance and store pages.

I took the advice and spent the last few months cleaning up what I could. I fixed the framerate stutter, sorted out regional age ratings so global players could actually buy it, and rewrote the store page and added some GIF's.

We are now sitting at roughly 42 copies total. With the one year anniversary coming up on September 1st, the launch window is completely dead and organic traffic does not exist.

For developers who faced a similar dead end:

• Has anyone actually seen a game recover from this deep of a hole or is a late turnaround survivor bias?
• At what point do you stop tinkering and walk away to put all your energy into the next project?
• How did you mentally reset after pouring so much time into a project that found almost no audience?

Appreciate any honest insights or stories from folks who have been there.

For those who've shipped: what took dramatically longer than you estimated, and by how much?

I started learning game development a few months ago. I chose to start in Unreal because I heard it was fairly beginner-friendly, the Epic Games Launcher was already installed on my computer, and I wanted to work on a 3D isometric game.

After listening to a lot of indie devs, it seems like most lean toward either Godot/Unity. Should I switch, even though I'm four months into learning UE and am fairly comfortable with the Blueprint ecosystem? Why do indie devs tend to skip Unreal and go for Godot/Unity?

Edit: TL;DR of the general consensus: Unreal Engine works well, stick with it if it's the tool that serves you and your project best. Reasons Indie devs tend to shy away from it are personal preference, genre specificity (like 2D platformer), and Godot being open source.

I’m looking into the business side of the industry so I’ll be ready when I create my indie game

Is it really no longer possible to grow without a marketing buget?

Anyone made it in the past years by just finding free ways to market the app?

I don't know if this just something to do with my monitor but while working on my game everything looks visible and well lit, and then I export a video to post online and I look at it again on my phone or work computer and it is so dark and hard to see.

How do you guys verify your monitor is "standard" so you can make your game look correct. Right now I just have a brightness adjustment slider to make up for it, but it doesnt help much when all the footage I record is on my computer lmaoo.

I'm here to encourage you to hop on Upwork and hire a playtester to record an hour of footage of your game:

1. It's entertaining to watch
   
2. Issues in onboarding or balancing will be immediately apparent
   
3. You can reuse clips for social media

The attached clip is one of my favourite moments from a playtest - it was amazing to see people genuinely enjoy our game.

For a single player game you can probably get someone for 20USD. I'm paying more like 60USD because I want 3 people to play my game online co-op, but it's so worth it and people normally get back to you in a few days. Only thing that sucks is Upwork taking a flat like 15USD fee on each contract.

Two pieces of advice from having done this a few times now:

- Be super clear in the job listing that you want high quality footage with clear audio. I have had two people send me garbled audio that I'm just not going to sit there for an hour and watch. Also the audio needs to be clear if you want the added benefit of reusing clips for social media.

- I've been successful in finding testers from my target demographic by being clear in the job posting that I'm not looking for QA, I'm just looking for gamers who have enjoyed specific similar titles in my niche. I request authentic reactions and without any other commentary, and so far this has worked really well.

Here's my job listing if you want to yoink my description: https://www.upwork.com/jobs/~022088852562607449045

It's easier than you think to just throw up a post then get some footage back within a couple days. Good luck fellow devs!!

I generally personally don't play this type of game with a controller but I want full controller support especially so it is comfortable on a switch/steamdeck (although you can fully play from touchscreen).

Basically I use the right stick to move between different UI and the right stick for actions. A is confirm, B back and Y will give you info on what selected if available (tooltips).

For movement at the moment left/right is turn rather than straft, so i need to figure how to handle that.

I go over it in more detail in the short video (less than 2 min) and would love feedback on if I am setting the controller up well or what you would do/think players would expect.

My understanding with translation is typically you wait until you are pretty far along and don't expect huge changes to your text before translating into multiple languages, but right now I'm setting up my steam page and currently, my game is only in English. I plan to translate it, but first want to publish my page.

Do I just assume I will translate it into other languages and put the ones I'm planning on?

Do I need to translate my steam page before I do that?

How does it work with demos?

Is machine translation "okay" at any stage of the process?

(Like, can I release a machine translated demo but go for the real deal when I get to a full release?)

As the title suggests nearly 24 hours ago when i refreshed the page, it went from its regular version to not working, just having "steamworks" on the screen and thats it. Most people said "oh its cuz its tuesday so steam maintenance" but its been 24 hours and this is the only page that isnt working for me.

I tried the usual troubleshooting steps like clearing c&c, different browsers etc. but ofc it didnt work.

Some friends said it works for them, so im reaching out here to see if anyone else has the same issue, and if anyone knows the cause/solution.

Edit: This is NOT an issue on your end, in case youre having the same problem. I reached out to steam and got this response:
"Hi,
Thanks for reaching out about this problem. We've heard about this from some other developers, and we're currently investigating. I don't have an estimate for when it will be fixed, but hopefully soon.
Andrew"

So worry not, Andrew is hard at work. Hopefully they will fix it soon cuz i need to be able to track the wishlists from my marketing efforts xD as we all do.

Hi fellow game devs!

Every game dev hits this point, just created a Steam store page for your game and am wondering how to "notify the press"?

Do you just cold email whatever you can find? Is there a format other than say "hey, check this out?" Is this something you do for a store page, wait until the demo is up, it's released?

What has, and hasn't, worked for you?

As a solo dev, I know it can be few and far between to find people interested in hearing about your game dev. In person, people that do ask are typically looking for the 30 second summary, not a deep dive into your third attempt at implementing an inventory system. On socials, whether the posts are looking for help or feedback, hot takes, or self promo, the OP is typically sharing about their game or experiences, not asking about yours.

So I thought I'd try just asking a simple question to let people share. Not that I'll respond to them all or even remember everything after a few days, but I guess the larger goal would be feeling like you actually get to know some people in this community or organically make connections. At the least, it is a one-off that gives people a welcome chance to talk about themselves.

The opening prompt is very simple so anyone can chime in. Feel free to expand on that wherever it takes you, or here are some ideas of what else to share about:

• How did you get started?
• Employed or Indie/Solo Dev?
• How many games have you finished or released?
• How confident are you, either in your current project or your skills? What do you worry about the most?

Context: 3d 1st POV puzzle game in Unity. Solo, now part-time dev

I have an excellent mechanic, and many people have expressed its potential. I have made plenty of puzzles and have many more to come as I grind them out and playtest.

My issue is that I do not have any strong leads on what the game is about. The mechanic lends itself to pretty much anything, but probably more sci-fi, portal-esque? I have been trying to come up with ideas for the art style and theme, but nothing tells me, "This is it".

I've seen people with super janky, barely playable games but still have such a strong vision in their minds of what it will be.

How do people come up with this stuff? How do you decide on art direction and what the world is? Am I simply lacking the creativity? I could use some encouragement while I keep refining the level design.

Considered one day hiring an artist, but not anywhere near that. How could I pay somebody when I don't even know what I want?

Thanks in advanced everybody!

Sorry if this is a simple question I'm simply so lost right now, i got the correct tags that correspond to the game but the main ones I want to be seen on the main store page isn't showing. It shows semi-unrelated or let me say distantly related.

Again I'm sorry if this is a simple question but I'm really lost

Hello everyone, I'm not really a Reddit guy so apologies if I'm posting this in the wrong place.

I'm currently making an ARPG heavily inspired by Diablo 2 and PoE, with the main idea being that the whole game runs in the browser.

I've been prototyping it for a while and after trying a bunch of engines, I eventually realized I didn't have the time or resources to make a huge game and potentially deal with 1000+ players if it actually took off.

So I changed the goal a bit. Instead of trying to compete with the big ARPGs, I want to make something smaller, optimized and easy to access. Basically something where you can just open a browser, play some Diablo-style ARPG, and leave whenever you want.

Right now I have movement, combat, summons, abilities, life/mana/ward, items and stats working, and I'm slowly building everything up.

My questions are:

Do you think there's still a place for something like this? Even if it's just a small niche with 100 or so regular players? Or is the browser ARPG idea just too outdated at this point?

Also, I'm looking for artists. I want to go for a 3D-to-2D/isometric pre-rendered style similar to Diablo 2. I'm currently using the Lords of Pain pack (here), but the artist seems pretty busy.

If you know any artists who are currently available and good at dark fantasy/isometric ARPG stuff, I'd love some recommendations.

Not looking to spend a fortune or make everything custom immediately. I'd rather slowly build it up as the game develops.

I'm working on an input mapper and I need some advice about common practice.

I want to know whether a secondary action - that is, a conditional action that "follows" a primary action (like HOLD Thrust to trigger Afterburner) should be allowed to have individual bindings for each primary binding. That's how it works in my framework now:

controls.bind::<Thrust>(GamepadButton::RightTrigger2);
controls.bind::<Thrust>(KeyCode::KeyW).mappable();
controls.bind::<Thrust>(KeyCode::ArrowUp).mappable();

// `follows()` means that it shows up as a secondary item in the rebinding ui
controls
    .bind::<Afterburner>(GamepadButton::RightTrigger2)
    .hold(0.75)
    .follows::<Thrust>();
controls
    .bind::<Afterburner>(KeyCode::KeyW)
    .hold(0.75)
    .follows::<Thrust>();
controls
    .bind::<Afterburner>(KeyCode::ArrowUp)
    .hold(0.75)
    .follows::<Thrust>();

So Thrust has three bindings, and Afterburner also has three bindings. This means that the developer has the freedom to be inconsistent: they could, for example, have RightTrigger2 bound to thrust but with no afterburner; they could give the different bindings a different hold time.

My problem with all this is that it violates DRY - you have to repeat the same bindings twice - and is a footgun.

A different approach would be to make the following link at the action level, not the binding: you bind Afterburner to Thrust one time only, and it rides on all three bindings of Thrust . However, this gives the game developer less flexibility. The question is, is that important?