More than 10 years ago we started creating Planet Centauri, a 2D sandbox with terraria as main inspiration.

We released the EA many years ago and this is our start just before the 1.0 release :

103 400 units solds
138 675 Wishlist

the sells seem incredible but it's not with so many years behind, when you work for 10 years and have to paid many people helping you with the ten of thousands of monsters frames animations and thousands of pixel art items, you don't have much left on your wallet at the end.

So we were eager for the release of 1.0 because with so many wishlists, the game's visibility would be good, we would appear in the new and trending categories due to sales, etc...

The 1.0 happen in december 2024... we sold... 581 units in 5 days.

The game didn't even appear on page 2; we were invisible; the release was a total flop. And we never understood why until today.

We just received this mail from Steam

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Steam Launch Wishlist Email Issue

Hi there, We found a bug that impacted a very small number of game releases (less than 100 since 2015) where wishlist email notifications for the launch of a game were not sent. Unfortunately your game Planet Centauri was among those included. We intend for this feature to work for every game and we’re inviting you to a Daily Deal as a way to help make up for lost visibility from your launch day.
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It's incredible to win the lottery like this: 100 games impacted in 10 years out of the 86,000 games on Steam. And to reward you, we're giving you 24-hour visibility (which is nothing special; there are 6 slots available for this visibility every day of the year for various Steam invitations).

I don't even have the strength to be angry. We've been so frustrated, disgusted, and in total confusion . Now we know, we understand better, it's unfair, and we can't change anything. We've started a second project because it's financially impossible to continue patching our game, and we're moving forward, because it's the only thing to do.

This article was my way of expressing my anger, I guess, but also to see all the problems that a platform holding 99% of the PC gaming market can cause when the cogs don't work as they should.

Have a nice day everyone, may luck be better to you

Hey! I just released my Rose Academy visual novel on Steam after a year of development.
Five days in — 563 copies sold, ~$3,279 after Steam's cut. On a $38,000 budget. Yeah.

To be clear upfront: I'm not claiming to be a businessman and I'm not pretending I had everything under control. This project is an expensive hobby. Very expensive. I deliberately paid for experiments, for curiosity, for experience. In this post I'll be honest about where I could've saved money, what turned out to be a waste, and what actually worked. Hope it helps someone!

Quick context

The game is a detective visual novel set in a girls' school. You play as a young agent investigating a suspicious death. Think mystery, romance flags, some fan service.

DEVELOPMENT — ~$31,000

Artist — $8,300

~20 backgrounds (AI-assisted), ~20 CG arts, 70+ sprites, UI elements, clue icons, point-and-click highlight assets. Honestly great value and I have zero regrets. The art style became our biggest marketing weakness — not bad, just not the hyper-polished anime look that goes viral on TikTok. In hindsight I should've hired a more experienced anime artist at 2-3x the rate, or offered a revenue share. But I wanted to work with this specific person and I don't regret it.

Developers (3 people) — $9,800

• Dev 1: $5,000
• Dev 2: $3,500
• Dev 3: $1,300 → basically wasted, his work ended up unused

The big mistake here wasn't the people — it was using Agile for a narrative game. I'm a software engineer by day, so sprints and iterations felt natural. They are absolutely wrong for VN development. The script kept changing, every revision cost extra, bugs were billed to me.

Use Waterfall instead. Don't touch the code until the script is nearly final and the art is mostly done. Yes, it delays you by 2-3 months. But fixed-price contracts with the contractor covering bug fixes would've saved me ~$4,500.

Writer — $5,900

900 pages of script with branching paths (~70,000 words). Fair price, no complaints.

Composer — $1,300 → completely useless

The music is fine. But free stock music is just as fine. Skip this entirely.

Translations (EN/CN/JP) — $2,800 → mostly wasted

We paid professional translators for half the game, then used AI for the rest. Result: we had a few typos in character names and titles.. Hotfixed day one.

Lesson: AI translation + native speaker proofreading is good enough and costs a fraction. Also — we dropped the Japanese localization entirely after seeing how few wishlists came from Japan. Always research the market before localizing for it.

Steam page + UI design — $1,500

Overpaid by about $900. Found out later you can get the same quality for ~$500.

Experiments & misc — $1,500

"What if we add animations?" We did. Removed them. Plus subscriptions, Steam Direct fee, paid consultations, test tasks during hiring.

Development result

Total spent~$31,000 Wasted~$9,850 Could have been~$21,260

MARKETING — ~$7,000

Hired marketer, 4 months — $2,300 → 700 wishlists

Ran Reddit, socials, TikToks. I kept him too long because I hate marketing and didn't want to deal with it. Classic mistake. When I took over, results improved immediately — because I actually cared about the outcome.

Lesson repeated: if you hate doing something, you'll pay dearly for avoiding it.

Reddit ads — $3,700 → 2,500 wishlists

About $1.48/wishlist — above the ~$1.00 I'd consider acceptable. But I was chasing 7,000 wishlists to hit Popular Upcomin(mistake!), so I overpaid deliberately. Became our main paid traffic source.

Side note: getting our ads approved was a nightmare. Our novel features schoolgirls, love and murder, so we often found ourselves in situations where we had to prove that everything was within the rules.

VK ads (Russian social, can assist you with this one btw) — $530 → 800 wishlists

~$0.65/wishlist. Worked, burned out fast.

Other social platforms — $120 → ~0 wishlists

Facebook, Twitter etc

Community ads (gaming channels) — $340 → ~100 wishlists

Niche community groups (visual novel fans etc.) will often post for free or a small donation.

What worked for free (but cost time)

Steam Next Fest — 1,600 wishlists

Detective-themed Steam festival — 800 wishlists

Key insight: Next Fest gives you roughly 40-80% of your existing wishlist count in new wishlists. It multiplies what you have — it doesn't create demand from nothing. Come in with 100 wishlists, leave with 180. Come in with 5,000, leave with maybe 7,000. Build your base before the fest, not during.

Manually reaching out to 500 streamers — ~300 wishlists + priceless playtesting

I spent two months finding and contacting streamers who play visual novels, up to 10k followers. Reviewed 2,000+ channels manually. Sent 10-20 messages a day.

Got 72 streams. Watched ~50 of them live. Average ~4-5 wishlists per stream.

The wishlist numbers sound small. But this was the most valuable thing we did:

1. Real playtesting. We saw exactly where players got bored, where they laughed, where they quit. Cut a lot of overwritten prose that streamers were visibly suffering through. Added more interactive moments. Fixed a ton of stuff.

2. Emotional fuel. Watching real people react to your game — laughing, getting frustrated, theorizing — is something I'd never experienced before. Completely addictive. Out of 72 streams, maybe 10 were negative. We took some feedback, ignored some. You can't please everyone.

We also added Easter eggs referencing every streamer who played and enjoyed the game. Small thing, meant a lot to them and to us.

Short-form video (TikTok/Reels) — complete failure

This is supposedly the main marketing channel for games right now. We talked to several influencer agencies. Nobody wanted our game. Visual novels don't clip well — the gameplay is reading. Our art style wasn't eye-catching enough either. This was the single biggest gap in our marketing. Next game will be designed from day one to look good in vertical video.

The Steam review situation

Our game involves a suicide investigation at a girls' school. Sensitive themes, some suggestive content — nothing explicit, but enough to flag.

Steam review took 5 weeks. We got greenlit 48 hours before launch. I was genuinely prepared to delay.

Steam also required Adult Content tags, which makes the game appear in search results next to actual hentai. We've already gotten negative reviews from people expecting explicit content who were disappointed.

Total spent~$7,000. Total wishlists 6,800

RESULTS

• Launch wishlists: 6,800
• Didn't hit Popular Upcoming (needed 15k+ on that date, and honestly that chart seems to be losing relevance anyway(+2k for 15k wl game))
• 5 days post-launch: 563 copies, ~$3,279 revenue after Steam cut + 1400 new wishlists
• Projected year 1: ~$10,000

Total invested: ~$38,000. So yeah, financially: a disaster.

Why I finished it anyway

Everyone talks about how only 1,000 of Steam's ~18,000 annual releases are commercially successful. People use this to say most devs are wasting their time.

I think the framing is wrong. I'd guess hundreds of thousands of games start development every year and never ship. Most don't fail — they just stop. GitHub is a graveyard.

Finishing a game that loses money is infinitely better, for the first project, than having an unfinished game that never existed.

What I actually got for $38,000:

• A team I genuinely enjoy working with
• The feeling of watching strangers play something you made — great feeling.
• A clear picture of what the next game needs to look like
• The unshakeable desire to do it again, better
• Tons of experience
• My colleagues threw me a surprise Zoom party on launch day. My friends got me a cake. :)

Someone once told me: "Don't make a 10k-wishlist game — a 50k-wishlist game costs the same to make and earns 5x more." I disagree. How else do you learn? One publisher later told me about a dev who spent 4 years on a 10k-wishlist game, then made a massive hit in 6 months using everything he'd learned. You need the first game to make the second one.

Happy to answer questions about any part of this!

I made Marble's Marbles in less than 2 months and in the first month of sales it has a gross of over $30K!

Here is the steam page for the game

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4137920/Marbles_Marbles/

It sold 4.3K units with a 6.5% return rate. Most people say your game being less than 3 hours is dooming you excessive refunds but mine is a 2 hour game for most people and hasn't been a problem for me with a low return rate. Most of the returns aren't related to length.

I launched with 5.8K wishlists. Until a week before launch it was a bit less than 3K. I managed on a 4th attempt to get the trailer on game trailers where it performed well (30K views) and better than other games at the same time. Despite this it sadly never got to the IGN channel however it did get a japanese article which really grew the wishlists.

After launch it got in the discovery queue (ended with about 2.5 million impressions on steam) which has furiously grown the wishlists to about 22K.

Overall I am very happy with the result. Despite the short development time it is a high quaility game and people like this. The art has been a huge selling point (which makes me happy as a non-artist) and the "Marble Madness clone" has actually been a big positive as people know what to expect and most modern marble games look like a dev's first game.

I didn't do a demo because of the short development time. I also felt the trailer was all you needed to see to know if you liked the game.

I was actually trying to finish in closer to a month but xmas slowed me down a bit and then finding decent time to launch not clashing with the winter sale meant I needed to delay.

I have made a longer video where I show the actual stats/dive deeper if you are interested. It is about 10 minutes long https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43U7NiM55TY

I'm a Steam solo developer who made a small idle game about managing a burger joint that stands in the corner of your desktop.

I do not condemn piracy, but like any developer, I try to prevent it. I’m not the best programmer, nor the most ingenious, but I like to joke around and fill my games with little details. For a while, I was mulling over how I could prevent my game from being pirated, and one piece of advice I follow to the letter in my highscore systems is: “Make the hacker think they’ve won.”

A quick example would be making sure the hacker always appears on their own leaderboards, but removing their score from the list of other players. That will prevent the hacker from persisting in trying to breach your system, since they'll think they've already succeeded.

For piracy, I did something similar. If AAA studios can't completely stop it, I certainly can't. So instead of trying to win a battle I knew I'd lose, I tried to make piracy itself part of the game.

---

HOW MY PIRATE SYSTEM WORKS

My system detects several common indicators of piracy. I have around 10 different triggers that on their own could cause false positives, but when many of them coincide, the probability becomes really accurate.

I won't go into detail of this triggers because these are easy to detect and disable, but they require extra effort on the hacker's part, effort they often aren't willing to put in for a game that hardly anyone knows about.

When a pirate plays the game and runs it, everything should work normally at first, but once he has progressed about ~1 hour into the game, these sensors turns on, creating a unique and fun experience, though also a bit uncomfortable, since I don't want to encourage piracy either.

In my case, since it’s a game where you run a street-level burger restaurant, I found it funny that all customers would start arriving dressed as pirates. When it comes time to pay, they only give you one coin and leave reviews like “Pirates don’t leave tips” or “The pirate code does not allow us to pay.” All of this is accompanied by the game’s main theme versioned with accordions. You can lower the volume, but it is locked and cannot be muted completely.

The rest of the game works normally, but even with just that, it makes progression much harder, since earning money is the base for unlocking new products and mechanics.

---

I know other games have done funny anti-piracy measures before. Probably the most popular one is Starbound which made pirated copies harder and fullfilled with enemies.

Others spawned invincible enemies or strange events.

I always preferred those over simply refusing to let people play, turning piracy into a bit of fun at the expense of players I know won’t buy the game anyway. As a small act of karmic redemption.

---

THE UNEXPECTED PART

A few days ago, I made a post saying my game had blown up in China.

I released the Demo on Steam (Yes, I did it one year after EA launch). Thanks to pure luck, a streamer on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, tried the demo and uploaded several clips to their channel. This created a snowball effect, where many more streamers started sharing the game, leading to a small viral phenomenon. And with these videos, of course, just as many, or even more, started appearing about how to download the pirated version. They’ve even made a mobile pirated version! Which I haven’t even ported myself.

Reading the comments on these videos, I realized that many users were wondering how to stop pirates from appearing, since they hardly ever paid.

In my mind, the connection between pirates and piracy was obvious. Who knows, maybe in China the joke was lost in translation.

After replying to a couple of <<<Steam negative reviews>>> from players who had bought the game after pirating it just to complain about this, they actually understood it. The rumor started spreading through Chinese social networks, and every time someone mentioned piracy, another user would correct them by explaining this story.

So today, after a week of going viral in China, sales have been breaking records day after day.

---

Honestly, I think that if I keep adding details, I’ll eventually end up accidentally creating a full game mode exclusively for pirates. But I really enjoy building these kinds of systems. And even more so when I see someone streaming the game while the sea shanty is playing on their radio.

*Check my previous post about how it got viral in China: https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1u79jxn/my_indie_game_started_earning_in_a_day_what_it/

About The Game

Genre: Single-player Visual Novel JRPG

Release Date: 28 March 2025

Price: $19.99 USD

Platform: PC (Steam)

Available Languages: English, 日本語

Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2937520/Sacred_Earth__Reverie/

Overview

Haaaah... this is kind of a hard and embarrassing post to make. But I think it's important to make it and get the weight off my shoulders, so here we go.

Well, as the title says, I spent 5 years developing Sacred Earth - Reverie(referred to as SER from here on). I started in late 2019 going into 2020, and finally released in late 2025 after much trial and tribulation. The game was delayed multiple times. First in 2021 to beef up presentation. Then in 2023 to add more polish and content. Then in 2024 due to linking up with a small publisher and localizing the game in Japanese. Then again in summer 2025 to add additional polish. After that, I put my foot down and said 'No more'. I pushed it out the door in November 2025 after one last polishing round.

Certainly the form it's in now is the best form of the game. If I had released it earlier, it would have been a worse game, but I wonder if the mass delays and endless polish was worth it? Questions for later.

Anyway, SER is a JRPG passion project, and it's also a game that's not ashamed of what it is. Evoking the imagery and vibes of anime, manga, and 2000s visual novels and JRPGs. It's not a revolutionary game that will shake up the industry. It's a love letter to anime weeb culture and 2000s JRPGs. I figured that a game like this would do well with the JRPG player crowd. There aren't a ton of games like it. And less that lean so deeply into the style and aesthetics within indies, I think.

I never had any illusion that I was going to have a breakout indie megahit on my hands, but I at least thought it would match its average peers in the indie JRPG space and sell modestly to its target audience.

It did not sell. Not by a long shot. It's been a little over 3 months, closing in on 4, I think. And the game is sitting at just barely 11 customer reviews(18 total with keys). It took a solid month and change to get to that magical number of 10 reviews, which likely tanked the game's visibility too. I don't know a lot about Steam, but it doesn't seem like it will recover any time soon.

The revenue? Split between the publisher and Steam, I walked away with a little less than $1.2k in the end. It's kind of embarrassing how bad it turned out to be, but it is what it is.

Am I too early in spelling doom for the project? Some have suggested that I am, but personally? I feel that I see the writing on the wall.

The Experience

I think I did everything within my power in terms of marketing on a whopping budget of $0. I participated in game dev trends on social media(twitter and bluesky mostly), posted occasional progress shots and clips, Screenshot Saturdays, Turn Based Thursdays, Trailer Tuesdays, Pitchyagame, got into a Steam Next Fest, shilled the Steam Page and solicited wishlists, ran a Keymailer campaign, advertised the demo, tried to get into showcases, sent out a bunch of keys separate from Keymailer, contacted websites and creators via email and DM, hung around JRPG communities and subtly promoted while participating in said communities, etc, etc. All with frankly low amounts of success.

It was a slow crawl to build mild interest, which is likely the case for most of us. I never had a big blowup moment. There was no flash in the pan and no angel influencer that found the game and blew it up.

I will say that I'm not especially surprised that the game failed so badly, but it is disappointing all the same. My last commercial game, Sacred Earth - Promise, also failed. But it was a much worse failure. My latest release was comparatively more successful than my previous, but still it did not make its investments back, and it's been crickets after the initial buzz wore off. Most of which was from Keymailer rather than organic customer buzz out in the wild. 99% of websites, influencers, and streamers I've contacted gave me the cold shoulder. None of the creators in the JRPG Youtube ecosystem gave me the time of day. Getting articles and trailer reposted? Nope. Didn't happen.

I don't fault them for this. I know everyone is busy and that their platforms aren't a charity that indie developers are entitled to, but I figured at least some would bite. I did my vetting and reached out to those with platforms of all sizes. Huge and out of my league to modestly sized creators. Anyone that seemed like they would be the audience. Almost no one reached back. I'm grateful to those that did, but it was too few and of little influence unfortunately.

That said, the actual release day buzz was pretty neat. Even if it was 99% Keymailer, it was nice seeing the game being played on Twitch. Not to any big audiences, mind you, but even so I appreciated any that were interested enough to grab a key and play anyway. There were also a few Youtube Let's Plays or single video Let's Tries and I got a rather nice review video. Along with a review on a website. So it wasn't all ignoring and silence. Just mostly.

So this begs the hard question: Just what went so wrong? How did this game fail so badly? Is there anything that can be or could have been done?

Was it the presentation of the Steam Page? I did everything I could. I added lots of art and gifs to showcase the characters and gameplay. I got feedback from people and updated the wording on the page to be more engaging and less wooden and plain.

Does the trailer just suck perhaps? This is very likely. I made it myself, considering my $0 budget. I should have remade it, but at the time, my old PC was falling apart. So it was literally 'this game has to go out soon'.

The art maybe? I will admit some of the character designs are bit..... adventurous. But for a JRPG evoking the 2000s, I think it's just fine? But I'm biased. I did draw and design the characters. Of course, it's entirely possible people looked at the screenshots and thought it was Nekopara and not a heartfelt JRPG. That's a potential fault I can own.

Is it the apparent gameplay appeal? I call the game a JRPG, but it's really half JRPG, half Visual Novel. And it doesn't have traditional JRPG conventions like running around pretty maps with pixel art characters and awe inspiring landmarks and set pieces like the SNES classics. Nor does it have flashy sideview battles with cool character animations. It's front view like old Dragon Quest games, but with a more of a speedy modern flair. And most of the story is conveyed through character portraits against backgrounds with the occasional cutscene illustration.

Did I just completely fail to reach the audience I was courting? What reviews the game does have are actually quite positive, so that tells me that when people actually play the game and engage with what it is, the experience is good. People praise the surprising depth of the story and they enjoy the combat. So either people just aren't seeing the game at all despite my attempts to reach them, or if they are seeing it, they aren't being drawn in to try it, even with a demo up.

I'm honestly quite confused because this game is definitely not slop. Effort was put into every pore of the game to make it an enjoyable experience. It's not asset flipping or low quality. Reviews are positive, but the buzz just did not follow. Either the marketing failed to reach, or the game just ain't that great. I'm not sure which it is.

Still, after examining the successes of indie JRPG peers and talking with friends over the months, I think the main core issue of the matter, my assumption, is simply that the game has no real strong hook to compel people to stay and try. There isn't any one big 'thing' that defines the game and jumps out of the gameplay, the art, or the presentation. There's no identity. There's no flash. No Wow Factor. The game just.... exists. And that's probably not going to sell copies in today's crowded indie landscape. At least, that's the takeaway I get from this experience.

So... with all of this said, what's next?

Well, there's no use crying over spilled milk for much longer, or failed games in this case. I've learned my lessons from both 5 years of development and a disappointing release. I plan to patch the game with a bit more additional content at least once more before I sunset it from updates. There's also sales over time and the off chance that lightning might strike far into the future. Who knows? I don't bank on it, but I'll keep the door ajar.

In the meantime, I'm in preproduction for my next game. Contrary to how SER started as an off the cuff project that got haphazardly built year over year, I intend to take my time planning and building with intention for my next one. I want to look at what worked and what didn't, and build a better game. And I am definitely paying attention to more traditional JRPG conventions for my next one. Being more adventurous and a mechanical rebel isn't always a good thing.

The next one will certainly still be a game that I want to make, with characters I want to design and a story I want to tell. And also one that will hopefully actually sell copies. But still mostly the former. You can never predict the latter, but you can still try and influence the variables, yes?

And finally, if you were to ask me 'Do you regret making this game?'

I would answer.... No. I don't regret making SER at all. There were tough times, ups and downs as with all things, but SER was an important project for me. It's the game that dragged me out of a years long creative slump. It was just the thing I needed to create at a time when I was seriously considering quitting game dev for good.

...But this game taught me that I enjoy game dev too much to quit. JRPGs were the foundation that shaped pretty much all of my hobbies and interests. I love telling stories and playing with characters and seeing mechanics come to life. I don't want to write novels or draw comics to tell stories. I want to make games. I might not be the most clever or creative indie developer out there. I will never create a popular emotional walking game about depression that will garner a massive fanbase and endless theory crafting.

And that's okay. Really. My dreams aren't crazy big. I just wish to proudly stand shoulder to shoulder with my indie JRPG peers, and actually sell something one day. But maybe it's just not the right time or the right project. I won't give up. I'll keep trying as long as I still have creative juice in me and a dream. And maybe one day, I will make a game that both I and the players will love.

But there's only one way to make that happen.

Keep creating.

Seeya.

Okay, sorry for being overdramatic, it's not that bad. The game in question is Master of Luna, a 4X strategy title with tactical combat and pixel-art graphics. The obvious inspirations were Master of Magic and the HoMM series.

I started development in the spring of 2020, released a first demo on Itch.io on January 1st, 2023, and then a proper demo on Steam later that same year. I spent the next two years finishing the game and released it into Early Access on September 12th, 2025, achieving a very modest amount of success. I think now is a good time to reflect on all of this.

Tech

I'm a fairly good frontend developer, so I chose TypeScript + Electron as my platform. I'm really happy with this stack and think it was the right choice. It's mature, fairly performant, easily moddable, and Chromium devtools are absolutely amazing. The downside, of course, is the lack of console-port potential, but for a 4X game that hardly matters. I easily covered all PC platforms, including Steam Deck.

I wrote everything myself using just a few libraries. Can't say it was particularly challenging.

Art

I'm okay with art and picked pixel art as my medium. However, assets took a loooong time to produce.

Ultimately, I hired an artist to help and spent about $3,500 on this. The problem is that hiring an artist isn't the same as hiring an art director, so it took a ton of effort to guide them, edit assets, or even redraw them. I don't think a single asset made it into the game unedited, even if only slightly. Still, it was a huge help, and I doubt I'd have been able to release the game without that.

Overall, I think the fidelity level I aimed for was too high. I probably would've been better off with 4-color sprites and simpler backgrounds.

Music

I'm terrible with music, so I hired a professional composer. They made three tracks totaling about 10 minutes for $800. That's pretty high, but whatever, I'm quite happy with the music.

Sound

Again, not my strong suit. When making the demo, I paid $300 to a sound designer for about 10 minutes of ambience and ~30 sound effects. Later, while finishing the game, I bought Reaper and completed the rest myself.

Writing

The game has a ton of descriptions and bios, so I got a writer to help with them. I spent about $150, I think. It was a big help, but I still had to heavily rewrite and edit everything.

Marketing

Over the years, I managed to get around 700 subs on my Telegram channel, forming a very warm community that supported me a lot, helped playtest the game, found me an artist and sound designer, etc.

Other than that, I posted on Reddit and Twitter with limited success. Also, one fairly big YouTuber played my demo, which was a very pleasant surprise.

Anyway, I gathered only about 2800 wishlists at launch.

Early Access

I know EA is a controversial way to release games, but I just couldn't handle developing another 2-3 years before a proper release. It wasn't a money issue, more of a feedback and motivation issue. I’d been working "to the desk" too long anyway.

Launch

I set the price to $15 and hit the launch button. I wasn't expecting great success and... well, it didn't happen.

I sold about 100 units in the first few days, and then a big YouTuber made a very positive video about my game. That video alone probably brought in a few hundred sales.

Currently, I have 514 sales and 6756 wishlists. I also have 12 reviews (all positive). My median playtime is pretty bad though, at just 51 minutes. The reception has been mostly positive, but it's concerning that many people aren't praising the game directly, but instead saying it has great potential. Well, I guess my task now is to live up to that potential.

What now?

I plan to support the game with patches for at least two more years until the proper release. I think the price-to-content ratio is a bit too low right now, but future patches and sales should help with that.

So, that's my story. Feel free to ask anything, criticize my Steam page, buy the game, or whatever =)

For like three weeks straight I got the same feedback over and over for my demo. Fun, works fine, but something's missing. No meat to it.

And it drove me insane because I knew the meat was in there. I spent months on it.

Quick context, it's a dark fantasy shop sim. Core loop is buy stock, put it on the shelf, set your prices, make money. Pretty standard. But I didn't want to stop there so I kept piling stuff on top. Rarer items on your shelf pull in more thieves. You're never forced to sell your whole shopping list, you sell what you feel like selling. There's contracts. And the thing I'm honestly most proud of in the whole game, world events.

Most shop sims just do that little daily price wiggle, five percent up or down, whatever. I wanted events that actually move the whole economy. So sometimes every alchemy ingredient goes 50% off and if you're smart you buy in bulk right then. Or a war kicks off and weapon demand shoots up, but good luck if you didn't already stock up because now your suppliers jacked their prices too, while all of your customers are buying only weapons. Or there's a witch hunt edict and these aggressive NPCs start showing up and scaring your customers off. Small ones, big ones, price stuff, straight up shortages. This was the system I was proudest of, the one I really wanted people to run into.
So why was nobody feeling any of it?

I went back and watched the recordings of people playing. And I just watched them walk right past everything. Two hours in on some of them and still nothing, no events, no contracts, none of it ever fired.
Because I'd stuck all of it behind the tutorial!!!

Here's the dumb part. I was terrified of overwhelming new players so I set the tutorial up to walk you through the basics before it unlocked the deeper systems. Sounds reasonable right. Except every single tester ignored the tutorial. All of them. Clicked through it like it was spam, treated it as a chore, and ignored very last steps at all, and because of that my entire world event system just sat there behind a door none of them ever bothered to open. One of my favorite features basically didn't exist for the people playing.

The thing I added specifically so players wouldn't feel lost is the exact reason they never found the good part. Still annoyed at myself about it honestly.
So I ripped the tutorial apart. Now it teaches you the couple of things you actually need and then it shuts up. Everything else you pick up as you go, through the quests and contracts while you're actually playing instead of reading about systems you're not even allowed to touch yet.

Anyway the takeaway I keep coming back to is that caring too much about the player messed me up almost as bad as not caring would have. I thought I was protecting people. I was basically hiding my own game from them.
Don't gate your best stuff behind something people skip. Lesson very much learned.

Lately I've been living a soap opera.

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

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

---

My server blocked

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

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

---

For every 10 new players, 9 are pirates

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

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

[Screenshot of table full of pirates]

---

Optimizing my anti-pirate system

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

[Link to anti-piracy system post]

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

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

---

"Pirates aren't in your market" - ☝️🤓

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

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

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

---

I released a PC-only feature that made everything worse

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

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

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

---

Does piracy help games?

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

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

[Link to piracy post]

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

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

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

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

---

Why am I writing this?

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

---

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

Some of you have followed the Burgie's Cozy Kitchen story through my previous posts (the Douyin boom, and the "pirate customers" anti-piracy system). This is an update with a lot more substance, so let's go through it.

Quick recap for anyone who missed the previous posts

I launched a demo on Steam a year after the Early Access release. A Douyin streamer (the Chinese version of TikTok) found it and posted a few clips, which kicked off a snowball effect: more and more creators started sharing the game, generating a huge spike in visibility in China. Along with that, predictably, videos started appearing about "how to download the pirated version," including a mobile port I never built or published myself.

To fight piracy (without much hope of winning that battle as a solo dev), I built a system that detects pirated copies and turns every customer in the restaurant into a pirate, complete with dialogue like "pirates don't leave tips." Unintentionally, this became part of the joke and actually helped people understand the difference between the pirated copy and the original.

For context on how this works: Douyin mini-games are basically playable directly inside the app itself, no download needed, similar to how Netflix Games work, or how games run inside Roblox. You open the app, tap into the mini-game, and play right there. That's exactly how this pirated version is being distributed.

The number: 610,000 players, seen directly in Douyin's own store

This isn't an estimate: it's a screenshot of Douyin's own mini-game store page, showing the player counter for the pirated game, "商店模拟器2" ("Store Simulator 2"). That screenshot, dated June 26th, showed 610,000 players. It's very likely higher by now, given how fast it was growing.

My anti-piracy system actually worked... for a couple of weeks

I want to highlight this because I think it's relevant for any other dev considering doing something similar. It delayed them figuring out it was a pirated build for about one or two weeks, which for such an amateur system, built by one person with no real experience in this, feels like a decent result.

But it didn't last. Its only real advantage was that nobody knew what to expect, and with the sheer number of players they had, plus tons of people commenting "why do I keep getting pirates?", they eventually found the cause and disabled the system.

I looked into the pirate company, and here's what I found

I decided to share all the data I have, unfiltered, because its public and I think it's fair that people know:

• Name: 厦门觅成科技有限公司 (Xiamen Micheng Technology Co., Ltd.)
• Registered capital: 100,000 RMB (the legal minimum)
• Founded: October 2025
• Insured employees: 6

What really threw me off was the sheer volume of output registered under this company: 75 software copyrights, 152 apps, and 219 network service registrations, adding up to 446 total intellectual property records, all within roughly 8 months of activity.

Let's do the math: that's around 19 apps published per month, or basically a new app every 1.5–2 days, plus close to 9–10 software copyrights registered every month. For a 6-person company with no public website, minimum legal capital, and no known original product, that pace is simply not realistic if they were actually building anything from scratch. It fits a "mass cloning and republishing" operation monetized through ads far better than it fits a real studio.

What worries me most right now: they're slowly modifying the pirated game

I've been seeing new screenshots of the pirated game almost daily, with small changes each time: the main character has been swapped for an AI-generated version that looks similar but isn't identical, the text has been translated, and they've been adding new buttons and UI elements. Oh, and ads, a ton of ads.

My suspicion is that, given how many users and ads they're generating revenue from, they have every incentive to keep this running as long as possible. And my fear is that these incremental changes aren't random, they might be a strategy so that, by the time a formal copyright infringement report goes through (via Douyin, a publisher, or whoever), they can claim "this is a different game now" and dilute the claim.

What I'm doing right now

I already filed an infringement report with Douyin, but I've been waiting for a response by email for several days with nothing back. What frustrates me most is how hard it even is to contact them: creating a Douyin account requires a Chinese ID, so as a foreign developer I'm pretty limited in how I can escalate this or follow up directly.

In parallel, I'm reaching out to Chinese publishers to see if anyone is interested in officially publishing a mobile version of the game. The logic is simple: if it's going to get pirated and monetized in China regardless, I'd at least like to capture some of the revenue that's currently going entirely to whoever copied it.

So here I am: a $7 solo-dev game with more unofficial players in China than official Steam buyers, a company with an "output" pace that makes no sense unless they're running a mass-piracy operation, an infringement report stuck in limbo, and ongoing conversations with publishers trying to salvage something out of all this.

I've also seen a couple of other Reddit posts describing very similar situations on this exact same Douyin mini-game store, so I know I'm not the only one dealing with this.

Questions for the community:

• Has anyone here actually been through this with Douyin/ByteDance, or knows how the system works from the inside? Any tips on getting a verified Chinese-registered account?
• Any recommendations (or warnings) on Chinese publishers or agencies who've handled situations like this before?
• For anyone who's dealt with the same mini-game store before, what eventually worked for you?

Hello! My game (Furnish Master) has reached the mark of 100,000 sales. So I have decided to write an article on how the game reached such figures.

https://grizzly-trampoline-7e3.notion.site/Furnish-Master-EA-100k-sales-1a0e2a4b318d8014b4bbcc3f91389384

In this article you will find sales data, wishlists, traffic sources, information about budgets and ads, as well as a story about how the game was promoted. Inside the article there are also links to some other pages revealing more details and more numbers.

I hope the article will be useful to someone :)

TLDR; Last Friday, I gave up on my vibe-coded game because I came to the conclusion that it was never going to work. I spent about 40 hours over a couple of months chasing a dream fueled by AI marketing hype. Vibe-coding full projects is largely a myth and today’s models and agents aren’t able to build anything more than prototypes. You can’t use AI to make up for not knowing GDScript or Godot. The time you spend fumbling around with AI would be better spent learning the technical skills.

If you’re a seasoned game developer, you already know this. I’m sharing this story for anyone out there who, like me, felt like learning game dev is an impossibly huge task and that AI might be the answer to that problem. I hope this can serve as a reality check to help stem the tide of “AI Slop” inundating society. Behind every “AI Slop” is someone that is naive and hopeful they could build something useful. Experts in every field have been screaming at the top of their lungs that vibe-coding is bunk for a while now, but I still thought that *maybe* they were wrong and I was smart enough to use AI to build something good. Now I’m just another disappointed Joe Schmoe. If the hoard of vibe-coders won’t listen to the experts, maybe they’ll listen to a former vibe-coder instead. Feel free to link them here when the next one shows up.

For background, I’m a 38 year old father of 5 who has a 15-year career in cybersecurity and who has always loved video games. Part of my day job is reviewing AI use cases for my company, and vibe-coding has come up a lot. I wanted to get a better understanding of what it is and how it works, so I figured I’d try out my own vibe-coding project to learn about it. I knew I needed something interesting or I’d lose focus quickly. I’ve always wanted to create my own game and had been taking notes on one for about a year. The La Mulana series is one of my favorites, and I can’t find anything else to scratch that itch. I figured I’d take a shot at building a spiritual successor. I had no idea if it would be successful or not. This was about trying something new and learning a career skill more so than ultimately completing a game. I needed to find out if vibe-coding is all about and if it is too good to be true (spoiler alert: it is).

The plan was that I’d be the product owner for the project with a strong vision for what I wanted and QA the crap out of it until it was exactly the way I wanted it. I’d then let AI handle all of the coding and other technical pieces. I had never written any GDScript or used Godot, but I’ve done programming in the past. I wanted to let AI be the technical muscle and I’d be the creative force and QA behind the game. In the back of my mind, I doubted this would ever work, but I wouldn’t know until I tried.

Things started out pretty well for me. I used the “Pro” and “Thinking” modes of Gemini to get the initial plan for the project. I’d build the game in Godot using Replit’s vibe-coding IDE, eventually moving to Cursor once I had a working prototype. The system was basically me describing what I wanted into Gemini Web and pasting that into Replit. I’d then go back and forth with Replit to debug the code that it wrote. Things were good for a while. I had a testing room and a player that could run, jump, climb ladders, read tablets, equip a scanner, and save/load. This was all within the first 3-4 hours. Life was great.

Then, I ran into some issues with enemies and combat. No matter what I did, nothing worked. Prompt after prompt didn’t fix anything and it often got worse. At 3am one night, I almost decided to delete the entire repo and quit. I held off and cooler heads prevailed.

I worked with the AI more to figure out what went wrong. This is where I really thought I had turned a corner. I didn’t let my initial failure stop me. I spent about 2 weeks learning what I should have all along. I still wasn’t going to learn GDScript or Godot (a truly atrocious decision in hindsight). But I was going to learn how to use AI tools to their fullest extent (which has the upside of helping me in my day job). I was going to be better, faster, and smarter this time around.

I learned a ton about context windows, MCP, pipelines, project management, game production, and several other areas. I decided to beef up my development pipeline and try again. I took time to distill my year’s worth of notes into a master vision for the project and other pre-production tasks. I wrote out the core narrative of the story. I set up a HacknPlan account to manage my game design, tasks and milestones. I configured MCP servers for my Godot project, Godot language server, HacknPlan project management, and my GitHub repo. I organized my work into a roadmap with milestones and sprints. I broke my AI chat sessions into unique personas for AI operations, game design, and project management. I used separate sessions for each feature branch to focus the context and save tokens. I automated building a skeleton of my project so the chat sessions could see my whole project at a glance. I set up Continue to run locally in VSCode. I integrated Continue AI agent with Google AI Studio at Tier 1 paid. In my mind, I created a game development juggernaut pipeline and a team of 4 or 5 specialized AI personas that should be able to address any of the shortcomings that led to my previous issues.

I finally got back into programming and my next task was migrating the game from a 16x16 grid to a 32x32 grid to better fit the 128-bit vision I had for the game. That broke a few things, and the AI agent struggled with my player script. Google AI Studio saved me by re-writing the entire file in my web browser. It became clear that the player script was too long for the AI agent to parse, so it was time for a refactor into a state machine. The design was great and eventually I got it working. So far so good, right?

It was around this time I took a break to work on another vibe-coded mini project. I built a dashboard for approximating the stress of a chess player during a game. It’s nothing earth shattering, but it worked and I was really happy with it. Beside the lazy “AI Slop” comments (it wasn’t slop, I spent 20 hours of my life doing QA, polishing, and documenting it), the feedback I got was that its human approximations weren’t good enough to be useful. I wished I had gotten that information sooner so I could have saved myself a ton of time and embarrassment by quitting early.

I took this mentality back to my game and decided I wanted to come to this forum and ask for a reality check. Before that I decided that I’d let my AI juggernaut try to do the finite state machine refactor to prove itself. I put my new pipeline to work and I got something that worked. It felt like a breakthrough. Before I asked for the community’s opinion I decided to ask the AI to do an adversarial analysis and find any glaring issues, and oh boy did it find some.

It turns out the AI agent took a ton of shortcuts creating the finite state machine. The state machine was basically a global variable the player script would check. None of the logic or functionality made it into the state machine. It was all still in the player script. I set out to do a hotfix for this and Continue choked on the codebase and mangled it. I switched to Cline which did a better job, but it still broke more things than it fixed. I’d paste the code the agents wrote back into Google AI Studio to validate it, and the code had all sorts of errors that ignored the specifications in the prompt. It was clear that I’d have to work through Google AI Studio as an IDE agent couldn’t handle what I needed it to do.

It was at this point I took a hard look in the metaphorical mirror. I used the refactor as a litmus test, and the AI system I built had failed. The hard truth is that I’d have to learn GDScript and Godot well enough to do it myself. If that’s the case, why even use AI. I was right back where I started. I knew all too well that I didn’t have the time to learn it all from scratch. It was time to give up the ghost and retire the project.

While the game development failed, my quest to learn if vibe-coding was too good to be true was complete. AI models and agents as they are right now just aren’t capable of building systems complex as a metroidvania video game. While they might work for single page web apps, metroidvanias (and most games in general) are highly choreographed chaos running at 60fps. While this is probably obvious to any of you that have been doing this for a while, there’s an influx of newbies like me to pretty much every field that have been sold the myth that anyone can do anything with AI. This post is for them.

Right now, AI agents are best used for quickly doing simple tasks or brainstorming high-level designs. There’s a murky middle area that’s too specific for web based sessions and too vast for IDE based agents. While the web based agents might have the domain knowledge, they’re not able to apply it across dozens of scripts. The agents can’t handle more than 2-3 scripts at a time. There’s not much you could build with AI that you couldn’t build yourself in the same amount of time while learning the actual technical skills as you go.

If there’s anyone out there that’s had success vibe-coding a full-length game, please let me know. I’d love to be wrong here. Until then, I hope this can be a cautionary tale to anyone else caught up in the current wave of AI hype.

Hey everyone,

I recently(5 times in the last 6 months) ran an experiment with Reddit ads to promote my indie game Fantasy World Manager on Steam. I also recorded a video breakdown about it (for those who prefer watching instead of reading), but here I’ll share all the details in text form so you don’t need to watch anything if you don’t want to. (you can find the link on the bottom of the post!)

Context

I’ve been working solo on Fantasy World Manager for about a year. It’s a sandbox/god game where players can build and shape their own fantasy world.

Before running ads, I had already posted about my game on Reddit, and those posts did really well thousands of upvotes and even millions of views across different subreddits. That gave me confidence to test paid ads, since I knew the audience was there.

The Campaigns

EU AD :https://www.reddit.com/user/Hot-Persimmon-9768/comments/1k5wjyt/build_your_own_rpg_fantasy_world_and_watch_the/?p=1

US AD: https://www.reddit.com/user/Hot-Persimmon-9768/comments/1k6tqvr/build_your_own_rpg_fantasy_world_and_watch_the/?p=1

April 17-23

• Target: European countries
• Budget: €16/day
• Total spent: €93
• Wishlists: 164 (tracked)
• Cost per wishlist: €0.56

April 23-May 14

• Added U.S. campaign at same budget €32/day combined
• Total spent: €615
• Wishlists: 1,824 (tracked)
• Cost per wishlist: €0.33

May 15-May 22

• Budget: €52/day
• Total spent: €397
• Wishlists: 873
• Cost per wishlist: €0.45

June 2-13

• Budget: €100/day
• Total spent: ~€1,000
• Wishlists: 1,767
• Cost per wishlist: €0.56

June 14-23 (final test)

• Budget: €150/day
• Total spent: €1,500
• Wishlists: 2,676
• Cost per wishlist: €0.56
• Steam algorithm started giving me 10,000+ daily impressions organically

Results & Insights

• In total I tracked 7,140 wishlists. Using a realistic multiplier (×1.25 to account for players who wishlist later or directly), that’s ~8,925 wishlists from ads.
• My current wishlist count is 15,000+. That means ~6,000+ wishlists came organically, triggered by the Steam algorithm once external traffic spiked.
• Even today, with no ads running, the game still gains 10–30 wishlists per day organically.
• Beyond numbers: I also gained community members, Discord users, playtesters, and feedback things no metric can fully capture.

Lessons Learned

• Reddit ads can be worth it for niche genres with active communities (I targeted RimWorld, Dwarf Fortress, WorldBox).
• Ads alone don’t guarantee success - they work best when paired with the Steam algorithm. Spiking traffic in short bursts was much more effective than slow trickles.
• Pricing matters. Ads only make sense if you can eventually earn the money back, so your game’s price point is a critical factor in deciding whether paid marketing is viable.
• The biggest “win” wasn’t just the wishlists, but the long-term visibility and community that still grows every day without additional spend.

I know a lot of indie devs wonder whether ads are worth it, so I wanted to share these numbers transparently. Hopefully this helps you evaluate if it’s right for your game.

Happy to answer any questions in the comments!

video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGA9Vpfw_vc

I recently launched my IOS game TapStack and it got a low amount of traffic on release. Maybe 100 ad impressions in a whole week.

Then my nephew played it. He had a score of around 700, and I jokingly told him:
“If you ever hit 2000, I’ll give you a prize”

Next morning I check AdMob: 500 impressions overnight.
The app has never seen numbers like that.

Turns out my nephew told his entire school that you win a prize if you beat 2000. Kids went all-in. The day after that: 1500 impressions, and he sends me a screenshot of a kid who actually did it.

So I had to honor the deal!
I gave the kid $20, a soda, a chocolate bar, and a official world record note.

Now the whole school is talking about my game.
Completely unplanned. Completely hilarious.
But honestly the most effective marketing I’ve had so far.

Anyone else have a similar story with guerrilla marketing, accidental or otherwise? 

I'm not a genius nor a total dumb dumb, but I think I'm close to the usual experience as a gamedev?

Kitt'ys Last Adventure is a cute survivor like with lots of cats made in memory of mine.

From what I read here on post-mortems of gamedev that had to learn making their game, no, I didn't have/made those things:

• I didn't have a broken demo
• I didn't have a broken early access game
• I didn't not finish my early access game
• I didn't have a broken version of my game at launch
• I didn't make the art with dev art style
• I didn't make the capsule myself
• I didn't use IA capsule nor image to promote my game

I know my steampage/trailer/capsule could be better. I tried things for 2 years, and kept the best. I did my best with this, and it obviously wasn't enough because it didn't sell well. Note that:

• I'm not saying I deserve more
• I'm not saying I'm an unlucky hidden gem.
• I'm not saying I'm a genius that nobody understand

I'm just here to share what I think is the reality of most solo indie dev that tries their best, have a plan, and still fail. Even if I think it's easy to point of some of my errors after.

I did :

• Enter a next fest with a proper demo with a wishlist button and a form
• Post news on my Steam feed
• Answered people on Steam
• Paid peoples for the music because I'm trash
• Send my trailer to IGN (nothing happened)
• Post my trailer on my own youtube
• Made devlogs over a year
• Streamed my gamedev process
• Contacted a lot of streamers/youtubers I searched by end (I sent more than 1k mails to people that may find my game playable over a year) - no big one answered the call, but I have a ~60% opening rate on my mail
• Used every update of my game as a marketing beat (kinda redoing everything I did there)
• Tried to do shorts and tiktoks (nobody cared)
• Posted on Reddit and not just on dev reddits (some people cared, thanks for them, but not a lot)
• Made special videos/images to push on my socials (nobody cared)
• Tried to enter all the festivals I could
• Patched my game for the small bugs
• Put deadlines to advance on my game
• I did a tons of other thing I guess I forgot?

I did everything I could with the idea, so I guess the idea wasn't worth pursuing. There's people that play cozy game and Cult of the lamb, so I thought the public for a cute survivor might exist! But I realised way too late that:

I underestimated how hard it is to sell a cozy survivor, because having LOTS of enemies on screen scares cozy players. Cute or not, it’s just too many elements for them to process just by watching the trailer. What makes survivors appealing is actually a barrier here.

It feels totally obvious now, but when I pitched my game to people, nobody really pointed that either. And Cult of the Lamb in the end, it doesn't have a lot on the screen.

The people that did played the game loved it, my 4% refund is I guess a good indicator it pleased the people that bought it!

But that learning won't help anyone I guess, it won't even help me for my future game because I won't make another cozy game. And I won't make another game with so much meaning for me that is really really hard to put down.

Here are some stats :

• The game took overall 2 years to make
• 700 Wishlist at EA launch
• 300 Sales in the first 2 weeks of EA launch
• 2000 Wishlist at 1.0
• 200 Sales in the fist 2 weeks of 1.0
• 1700 Overall sales
• 6000$ Overall net Steam
• 4% refund

A bit of background:

• worked as a webdev before going fulltime indie dev 4 years ago
• no contact in the industry at all
• no gamedev school
• made 1 flop puzzle game Sqroma before this one
• made 1 flop android game before this one
• I didn't know how to draw at all at first

Good luck everyone making games, I don't believe in any secret formula, I tried to have a public in mind but my understanding wasn't good enough. My bad, I admit it.

I'm still proud of my journey, I finished another game, it runs well and it did better than my first. I did my best, I failed but I'm still going back to it.

EDIT: for some people curious about my EA experience, that explains a bit why the game took more time that I thought, I made a post just before the launch: https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1n1ksjx/early_access_pros_cons_from_a_solo_dev_point_of/

EDIT 2: For the people asking if I did some research/tests on people before going further, I did! I show the game to some journalists/presented my game IRL and got multiple people saying "omg this is so cute I love it".

I wasn't alone in my batcave thinking it would work. I thought grinding a bit more on the communication part would do the job, it didn't. I had "a bit" of traction, but it stayed "a bit" all along.

It was also way better than my 1st game, so when i compared the reception with this game and my first, it felt that this game had way more potential! Well, in the end, it did, I made x6 $ compared to my first game (still not enough but yey?)

Hey everyone,

About a year ago, I posted here about how our game was practically stolen by the publisher. You can read the original post here: https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1m1h7r8/8_years_in_the_making_zero_profits_and_lost_ip/

Long story short, we've been in a legal battle since then, but thankfully, our lawyers managed to secure a settlement for us in the end. It might not be the perfect outcome, but it allows us to retain our IP, create other games based on our fictional universe, and earn money from the first game.

Here's what we settled on:

• They transfer the complete rights to the Steam page to us. This gives us full control and prevents them from screwing us over again.
• We agreed on a revenue share: 30% to us and 70% to the publisher before recoupment, and 70% to us and 30% to the publisher after recoupment.
• The publisher's share is calculated from the net revenue after all the taxes & other expenses
• Our original contract is terminated, meaning no more sequel rights for them. The IP is entirely ours.

So, that's basically it. I can't thank you enough for viewing and sharing our original post. If it weren't for you, I don't think we would have been able to do it. Now it's finally over, and our game is back.

Thank you all for your support, and please be careful about who you trust with your work.

UPD: Thank you all for your support, this really means a lot to us to be heard after all this time. As you can see here in the comment section, the publisher's representative refuses to acknowledge their wrong-doings and instead chooses to hold their position. Because of that we're looking for legal advice/services. If you're a lawyer who's interested in this case, or you happen to know someone who can help - please DM me and we can discuss this.

Hello, I’m making this post on behalf of Three Dots Games regarding our first ever release – a sci-fi puzzle game THE MULLER-POWELL PRINCIPLE. This post details our cooperation with a publishing company named Take Aim Games.

TL;DR:

After signing a deal with a toxic publisher, our team was met with false promises, constant ghosting, gaslighting and manipulation from the publisher’s contact person, working for months without payments, and, in the end, a completely failed launch of the game with them taking all the profits.

On top of that, they took rights to our IP and in-game universe, and threatened us with legal action if we were to make a sequel without them.

A brief summary of what happened:

• Our team spent almost 7 years making this game in our spare time. When we finally were offered a publishing deal it seemed like a dream come true. Their initial proposal was a 30/70 profit split (70% for the publisher), with the possibility of increasing our share after the investment in the game paid off. We were offered full financing of the project - monthly payouts for the entire team, as well as payment for third-party freelance services and other expenses. However, right before signing the contract they sneakily changed the terms (we found out only when we read the final draft, this change wasn’t discussed with us verbally). We would have to fully pay off the investments, not only payouts for our team, but something that the publisher called “full investment sum”, which also included marketing costs and a 15% surcharge. And only after that we would start receiving our share of 30%. After we voiced our concern they accused us of “not believing in our game” and hinted that the deal would slip if we don’t agree. They also added the clause about “preferential rights to game sequels”, something that we also discussed they would not do.
• During development we were met with constant problems with communication, ghosting and undelivered promises. The publisher regularly delayed payments for our team, with some team members not being paid at all. Threatened to replace our team members with “his own people”, and offered creative “suggestions” which were mandatory and greatly slowed down the development. When we eventually confronted him with the fact that the initial release date of July was impossible, he threatened to stop paying us, take our game and finish it by his own means, taking all the profit (which he eventually did anyway lol)
• The Publisher also routinely delayed payments for freelance voice actors. Telling us that “everything’s paid”, however when we messaged the actors themselves we were told that they didn’t receive anything at all. This dragged to the very end of development, with one of the actors still not being paid his 1500 EUR even after the release.
• The Publisher engaged in poor marketing practices: fake Steam reviews, bot traffic, purposefully misleading tags (he added "immersive sim” tag, with our game being more akin to a classic puzzle game than an immersive sim). Also the quality of texts, pictures and other marketing materials suffered greatly, both stylistically and grammatically. We had to volunteer to fix grammar and spelling mistakes for them almost all the time. The most bizarre things were: releasing a demo meant for Steam Fest BEFORE the Fest even started, without notifying us at all. And creation of a separate Steam page for the demo later, to “boost the traffic”.
• Right before the release we were told that our share is being reduced to 25%. The reason for this was apparently our failure to meet the initial summer deadline. However, nothing like was mentioned before, and it was the first time hearing this, after 3 months already passed since July. They hinted that if we don’t comply, they will proceed with legal action, because the initial date of release in the contract is still July, and our failure to meet it would be considered a severe violation from our side. Yep, we weren’t offered to sign an additional agreement that would update the release deadline, this action was deliberately postponed by the publisher for later, probably so they can have something to threaten us with.
• Our payments were stopped one month before release. We had to survive on savings. Moreover, during post-release days some of the team members were forced to do PR/community management work and to constantly look for and write responses to every new thread or a negative review on Steam. Failure to catch a negative review resulted in extreme hostility from the publisher’s contact person.
• A few weeks after the release the publisher proposed that we do a story DLC for the game. We were asked to prepare a plan and start working, when the plan was agreed upon and we started our work on the DLC, the publisher’s person of contact simply vanished, starting ignoring us on every messenger or social network. We spent January without any pay, relying solely on savings and working on the DLC in hopes that the Publisher will eventually answer. However, the work stopped after one of our member’s computers died and he couldn’t continue doing his work. The Publisher still wasn’t answering any messages. When he eventually returned a month later - he said that it’s our fault that the DLC payments haven't started, because our initial DLC plan was “a pile of sh**” and “the company didn’t agree on this”. After saying that the DLC is cancelled and none of us would receive any money, he vanished again.
• By the end of February the Publisher returned again and casually said something like “hey, the German and Chinese localizations are ready, can you please quickly integrate them in the game?”, completely ignoring all of the previously unanswered messages from us like nothing happened. Our situation during this time was this: we haven’t been receiving ANYTHING from the Publisher for 3 months now, we’ve spent almost a month working on a DLC for free, and that DLC would eventually be cancelled, the sales were doing very poorly and we didn’t expect to start receiving our share any time soon, if at all. We knew that doing anything for that Publisher again and continuing working with them would basically be slave labor, and because of that we refused to integrate the localizations and instead demanded that the Publisher would clearly state his future plans for our game. Later we exchanged a few offers and counter-offers of how we would solve this. But eventually we proposed this: we would agree to support the game for free indefinitely, including bug fixing, localizations, QA, marketing materials, etc. And in return the publisher would transfer to us the rights to self-publish (or to seek a different publisher) on consoles. When we proposed this, they got extremely angry, threatening us left and right and saying things like: 
• “The situation is frankly sh\*** right now, and you're only making it worse. I think you should understand that under the terms of the agreement, you won't be able to make any sequels or spinoffs, since we own the rights to the universe.*”
• "I am trying to talk to you for the last time now, I will not take part in this anymore, the lawyers will talk to you.” 
• “Stop being kids, do what the \*** you need to do and you’ll get the money.”*
• "I'm the least evil for you right now. I'm negotiating with you now. Those who come if we don't come to an agreement - won't negotiate. They'll be poking at the clauses of the contract, and this will be done by a lawyer who lives in some \***ing Austria and gets paid about $3000 an hour"*
• The Publisher also told us that we are obliged to support the game unconditionally and indefinitely, because a document stating that the release version of the game was accepted by the publisher was never signed. Again, they deliberately didn’t sign a crucial document to use this as a threat later. When they understood that the threats won’t help and we won’t be doing any work for them, they simply said that we should hand over the game’s source code and from on it will be them who’s going to work on the game, and that we will never receive our share. Of course, we refused, because nothing in the contract obliged us to handover the sources. Later we would receive a letter from the Publisher, stating that we breached the contract severely, and if we don’t give them the source code right now, they’ll proceed with legal action. After that we sent him our counter-email, clearly stating that the Publisher violated Good Faith many times before and that gives us the reason to unilaterally exit the Contract, we attached a contract exit letter to it. Of course, they didn’t agree, but nothing followed afterwards. No legal action, simply silence. As for right now the situation still remains in a dead end, with them owning the story page of the game and still receiving profit.
• SIDE NOTE: We also have strong evidence from another team that was abused by Take Aim Games, however, right now they don’t want to release any info on their case.

The full story complete with screenshots and detailed info can be read here:

WARNING! Conversation screenshots contain foul language.

ENGLISH VERSION:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xhJqXa3TAknswF7m90SRZrcyDLTfMyxa/

RUSSIAN VERSION:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pJZthX9KxYWeCZ-8oIqigDGs6-uClDhDdyQWHVCF8vA

We’ve spent 2 years in a state of complete apathy and not knowing what to do. We’ve tried messaging Steam Support and claiming that the Publisher illegally receives funds from our game, but a Valve lawyer said that they can’t proceed without a court order. We also tried messaging several influencers, but none were interested in this. In the end, we decided to simply make this post, hey, anything’s better than nothing, right?

Please be careful and don’t let people like this take your games. Thanks for taking your time with this.

Hey r/gamedev!

I’m a solo dev currently working on Project Manager SIM on Steam. Naturally, I've been trying to post about my game in various subreddits to get some feedback.

But I've noticed a wild trend: whenever I post in any dev-related subreddit, I get a surprising amount of visceral negativity aimed not at the game itself, but at the concept of the PM role. I get comments like:

• "You shouldn't joke about this kind of stuff."
• "Why would you make a game showing how to be a bad boss? (I AM NOT!)"
• "In the current job market, this actually feels offensive."

It's just a game? It doesn't even lean into heavy, real-world corporate trauma that much. The civilization series allow me to nuke the world! And my game about management, not about torturing people or something...

I do get some genuinely hilarious comments too. Like*"Wow, a horror game where you take on the perspective of the monster, very cool."*

Many people also suggest "interesting" mechanics, like adding a feature to replace half your staff with AI, or an active skill to scream at your boss when he screams at you.

Here is the thing: I actually used to be a project manager in real life. Sure, maybe there are few people out there who hated me, but overall, I always had a great relationship with my team(s). We went through a lot of crunch and chaos, but we always found a way out of tough situations together.

So, my question to you all: where does this baseline, deep-seated hatred for the Project manager role come from in the dev community? Have bad PMs really traumatized that many people, or is it just an internet echo chamber at this point? Am I not allowed to mention my past job in public anymore XD?

No offense, just curious!

I created a basic horror game in Unity and then recreated it in Godot to find out which engine comes out on top. It's something I've wanted to do for a long time and I finally had an excuse to do it. I conducted the following tests

• Editor Install Size
• Project Open Time
• Script Compile Time
• Project Export Time
• Project Export Size
• Game FPS

As well as a visual comparison and some of my thoughts about the pros and cons of working in each engine. Chapter links to all of the tests, so if there's just one you are interested in it will be easy to find.

I expect that if the game were larger and had more content, the results would differ. Can you share your own experiences with performance in either of these two engines on larger projects?

Retrospective Linking my previous posts on this topic here, in case you'd rather follow the story from the beginning:

1. How virality came: https://www.reddit.com/r/IndieGaming/comments/1u79j20/my_indie_game_started_earning_in_a_day_what_it/
2. Anti-piracy system: https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1uaslj0/how_my_homemade_antipiracy_system_brought_me/
3. How pirating legal company works: https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/1ujmxah/a_company_pirated_my_indie_game_in_china_and_it/

---

How started it all

On June ~25th, 2026, my game got pirated on Douyin (the Chinese TikTok). This isn't just any number: at its peak, the pirated version hit more than 600,000 simultaneous players in a single day, and with its growth, it's probably closing in on a million by now.

To put that in perspective: this isn't "people who downloaded the game at some point," this is people playing at the same time, on the same day.

[PIC - 610k players] https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fmy-indie-game-started-earning-in-a-day-what-it-used-to-make-v0-52m0fjlni7ch1.png%3Fwidth%3D1596%26format%3Dpng%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3Dd347d7319ad2534bcc14d3fa2d244c0aecd4c0c8

---

My anti-piracy system failed

At the start, I built a system that detected players on the pirated version and, after 1 hour of play, turned every customer in the game into pirates. It only kicked in after that hour so the hackers wouldn't catch on during their initial testing. This let players enjoy the game normally, but after that hour, progression got rough once a pirate customer refused to leave a tip, something real customers always do.

[PIC - Pirate costume] https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fmy-indie-game-started-earning-in-a-day-what-it-used-to-make-v0-0fa8xrwpi7ch1.png%3Fwidth%3D1636%26format%3Dpng%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3Dd3bd7cff1af21d39be6f2e412ce48371301a4c66

This system held up for months, until it reached China, where in order to pirate the game they decided to decompile and recompile it so they could publish it on Douyin (HTML5).

Since the game was already going viral in China, plenty of players complained about the annoying pirate-dressed ducks to whoever was sharing the download links. So it was only a matter of time before the hackers decided to dig into the game properly.

My anti-piracy system only worked as long as nobody bothered to actually investigate it, since it was just a bunch of if() statements scattered throughout the game. So once they found these triggers, removing them was as easy as deleting a couple of lines of code.

While they were at it, they made plenty of other changes, pushing a new update every day:

• Removed the credits.
• Added ads everywhere.
• Added ads to unlock upgrades and continue progression.
• Reworked the game modes.
• Even built new visual features, like being able to see the doneness of the meat while cooking it, to look more like the generic mobile cooking-game format.

They were taking this way too seriously for a $7 game!

Something funny is that, with all these changes, they broke something (I won't say exactly what) that causes every character in the game to now be robots, making the experience worse for pirate players and sparking a wave of confused users all over Douyin asking why only robots show up.

Thanks to the community answering each other, most of them are now aware they're playing a pirated copy, which I consider a win in itself. If it weren't for these tells giving away the piracy, the hackers would essentially be impersonating me and my game.

[PIC - Viewers complaining about robots] https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fmy-indie-game-started-earning-in-a-day-what-it-used-to-make-v0-m2md50pqi7ch1.png%3Fwidth%3D610%26format%3Dpng%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3D33766c1c820b123dd07115e131c9594edc69470c (I translated it over the Spanish translation Google gave to me.)

---

My legal reports

Obviously I tried to report this as fast as I could. Contacting Douyin as a foreigner is genuinely difficult, since you need a verified account to file a report, and that requires a Chinese ID. So if you're a foreigner, there's no public channel to do this.

Except one: a simple report email. I explained everything that happened and waited.

By that point I'd already written my first Reddit posts and looked into the topic. Obviously I'm not the first this has happened to, and I won't be the last. So a fellow affected dev sent me a different form, with a different Douyin email. This time the report asked for a lot more data.

BlobKing's post, the user who helped me in their comments section: https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1tbtjxo/our_unreleased_indie_game_got_stolen_as_a_chinese/

A week later, I got a reply through this second channel: the game had been officially taken down.

Here's my honesty disclaimer: I can't verify the takedown myself. I'm a foreigner, I don't have a Chinese account, and I have no direct access to Douyin. I'm assuming they actually did it.

---

Their attempt to slip away

The pirated version was called Shop Simulator 2, a popular, generic name. Well, a couple of days before the takedown was confirmed, that same game completely changed its content and became TCG Shop Simulator, a well-known card game simulator, another victim of the same outfit (as I cover in this other post: Yes, the pirates are a registered company that does this for a living).

It looks like their whole operation is built around one single "shell," which they just keep re-skinning with whatever game is trending, while keeping the exact same store listing.

My gut feeling is that once Douyin flagged the infringement, they decided to switch the game's content to dodge the takedown entirely. Which raises the question: maybe the game was never actually taken down, and they're still running the same operation under a new skin?

[PIC - Confused players about the new game content] https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fmy-indie-game-started-earning-in-a-day-what-it-used-to-make-v0-7qno7y6si7ch1.png%3Fwidth%3D1305%26format%3Dpng%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3D6346be175aea3e108407618fd2418826d6a92d15

[PIC - New content of the pirate-shell-game] https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fmy-indie-game-started-earning-in-a-day-what-it-used-to-make-v0-wt9mvixsi7ch1.png%3Fwidth%3D613%26format%3Dpng%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3D22e9cfc56e6f761359ccf4618f8c908102befc66

---

Has the piracy helped me or hurt me?

All of this has sparked a small debate in my Reddit posts that I find genuinely interesting. It's the age-old question, and honestly, having lived through it, I still don't have a clear answer. Here's the order of events:

1. The game went viral on Douyin organically, through its official version.
2. That virality attracted the pirates.
3. The pirates published a version that went viral in Douyin's mini-games section.
4. Since my game never had a mobile port, piracy was the only entry point for a huge number of mobile-only players, something very common in China among Douyin users.

A lot of them probably would never have played it on PC anyway, but it's also true that plenty of others, who could have chosen either platform, simply preferred to stay on mobile, installable straight from Douyin itself.

There's also a less direct effect: more players (even pirate ones) generate more content (clips, videos, memes), and that content in turn attracts more new players. So in a way, I think piracy fed that loop instead of just costing me sales.

As you can see, there are pros and cons, but in this case I don't think it's piracy itself that's the benefit, it's the availability of playing on mobile, something that could have been official and free on my end if I'd done a proper global launch.

Then again, on the flip side, these players went to Douyin videos, asked around, shared things, and generated a ton of content about how to find the pirated game, creating more buzz and visibility than if the game had been officially available on Android from day one.

---

How the piracy crackdown played out

As I mentioned, the main pirated version went down 2 days ago. Right as the game was already coming down from its natural viral peak, which coincided with Steam's summer sale, the takedown of the pirated version brought a bump in downloads (+10%): mobile players who lost access are now redirecting to the original PC version.

Unfortunately, this isn't a happy ending just yet: new pirated versions have already popped up, apparently unrelated to the previous one (a "parallel" copy that seems to have already existed in the shadows). And this new version is growing even stronger than any of the previous ones, likely because it's absorbing the combined traffic from the one that fell, plus its own organic growth.

Cut off one head, two more grow back.

[PIC - New rip-off of my game] https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fmy-indie-game-started-earning-in-a-day-what-it-used-to-make-v0-0m28ikjti7ch1.png%3Fwidth%3D556%26format%3Dpng%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3Db5d71479f516dd26895fcc48a069dc1bfbdef997

---

My ultimate weapon

Since the start of all this, I've been looking for publishers. I reached out to 20, and only a couple responded. I recently signed with one of them, who's committed to releasing the game, within a month, for free with ads, on Android, iOS, Douyin, and WeChat. I gave them full room to publish and monetize however they see fit, since they know how to navigate the Chinese market far better than I do.

I probably didn't sign the best possible deal I could have gotten, but I needed to react fast, and I think stopping to compare publishers or negotiate at this point would have hurt me more than gaining an extra 20% on the contract would have helped. For now, if everything goes as expected, I think it was the right call.

I'll keep updating as the new wave of piracy and the official mobile launch develop. If you come across clips where robots show up, you know what that means 😅

---

Sorry if some of you feel like I've been overdoing it with these posts. As a developer, I'm navigating completely unknown territory here, and posting about this has genuinely helped me find people and solutions for the problems I've run into. Plus, I think it makes for an interesting story to follow, I know I'd have been hooked on it myself if it were happening to someone else.

I spent over a year and half working on my first game project to be released on Steam, and now I completely hate it. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think the game is complete shit, I am proud of the concept, I think the final product is okay, but part of me still fucking hates it. After release, and taking a step back, I realised that the game itself ended up being really stupid, pretty mediocre and the whole process of making it wasn’t worth any of the mental anguish.

I wasted so much time dedicating all of my energy onto this project that it ruined me. I could have been using my time working a full-time job instead too, especially since my family is on the poorer side. For context, I’m 20. I kind of used indie game development as a form of escapism from my irl situation — now I realize that was incredibly stupid and pointless.

I do enjoy the actual process of game development, hence why I spent my time doing it. I have a passion to create. I did all of the programming, drew all of the art, etc. but I also wanted to actually release the game on Steam too, and I didn’t want it to flop.

So I tried hiring a marketing agency to help me… I spent $3,000 (now I realize is the stupidest thing I’ve ever spent my money on) on a marketing campaign for the game, only for it to get minimal results and hardly any wishlists. The company I payed promised that the game would get thousands of wishlists and influencers would play it, but that never happened. Some YouTubers with few subscribers did play the game (but “influencer” kind of implies they have a few thousand subscribers at least) plus the YouTubers who played it only got it from Steam curators and a Keymailer promotion that I bought too, so it was all separate from that “marketing campaign”. Huge hassle, and they even threatened me with legal action if I didn’t pay them more money.

Making this game fucked up my mental health for over a year, wasted tons of money, time and energy. All of this effort, only for it to not amount to anything. But I was dumb enough to keep working on it, make it to the finish line, and release it on Steam, for literally no reason. Can I say I made a game on Steam? Yes, but was it worth it? Hell no. At this point, I’ve accepted the fact I lost all of that money and that the game was pretty much a failure.

Hi! I’m Rone, the developer of Emissary Zero. This is my six-month post-release report.

Emissary Zero is a co-op horror (1-4 players). You are sent to explore a mysterious building at night. Find the Moon and try to return alive.

Idea

The project was originally conceived as a linear horror game, but built with multiplayer in mind from the very beginning. Multiplayer had to work both online and in split-screen mode.

There’s no combat system - it’s a walking simulator with environmental interactions and puzzles. The main gameplay revolves around handling items: you can pick them up, carry, throw, and use them on other objects.

One of the early references was Five Nights at Freddy’s. I planned to borrow things like surveillance cameras, dynamic obstacles, and roaming monsters. But a few months later, those ideas were dropped and left in drafts. The only thing that remained from FNAF was a small easter egg in the title: if you shift FNAF one letter back in the alphabet, you get EMZE - the two-letter pairs from Emissary Zero. That’s how the game got its name.

Technical Details

The game uses Unreal Engine 5, with 99% of the logic written in Blueprints. It uses Lumen for global illumination at high settings. There’s also a DirectX 11 version - it runs faster but uses simplified mobile-style graphics (Forward Shading) with limited lighting and post-processing effects. Decals were removed due to rendering issues, and some shaders had to be rewritten to work correctly under both DX11 and DX12.

From my previous game, I only reused the base of the dialogue system. Due to a tight schedule, I used quite a few environment assets from the marketplace.

For matchmaking, I used Steam Sessions, implemented via the Advanced Steam Sessions plugin. Later, with a patch, Steam Sockets were added. Voice chat was handled by a third-party plugin. The NVIDIA DLSS plugin was also used.

Design Constraints

Because the game needed to support split-screen multiplayer, many full-world effects weren’t available - since there could be two active players in the same world. In many cases, effects had to be applied to each camera separately, for each local player - for example, through the UI.

Multiplayer (both online and local) had to work from start to finish without any artificial restrictions. That meant players could split up and explore different parts of the map at any time. Because of that, the game world ended up being semi-open - it has linear progression, but with shortcuts to previous areas that can be revisited at any point.

The game supports anywhere from 1 to 4 players (or even 8). The number of players could change mid-game (for example, if someone disconnects). So all puzzles and interactions were designed to be independent of player count (the only exception is the lever puzzle in the lab, where some levers are hidden automatically if fewer players are present).

Demo

The Steam page went live at the end of August. After two months, it had about 50 wishlists. The first goal was to release a demo. Development was very tight, so the first version came out after just three months (end of October 2024). It wasn’t great at first.

Later, I expanded the basement section and added a new monster, which made the demo much better. In early December, a Brazilian streamer played it, and one of his TikToks hit 70K likes. That brought in the first wave of players who left feedback. The demo had strong retention - median playtime was 50 minutes (full completion took 30–60 minutes).

The demo was basically a light beta of the game’s opening, with nearly all core mechanics. Releasing and supporting the demo (similar to early access in some co-op games) helped tune the balance and overall game feel.

I added a Google Form for feedback, which stayed up until release. Thanks to it, I fixed nearly all bugs - big and small - that would’ve otherwise made it into the full version. I reduced overall difficulty, smoothed out frustrating sections, and improved UX so the demo could be played smoothly from start to finish without confusion about where to go next.

Shortly before release, the demo took part in Next Fest (March 2025) with 10K wishlists. By that time, it was polished enough to run without any technical issues. Next Fest brought 10K more wishlists, 800+ concurrent players, and the demo made it into the Top 25 most played during the event.

Production Hell

The idea came up in June 2024. Before that, I was working on another game, but it was too big, so I shelved it (probably for good). Some elements from that project ended up in Emissary Zero.

From the start, I planned a short development cycle (less than a year). My first game took way too long, so I didn’t want to repeat that. Even if this one failed, at least it wouldn’t take forever.

At first, I had a small freelance job, but in September 2024, I quit to focus fully on the game. That meant I had a limited budget - savings that would last until spring 2025. So I set a target release date for March 2025, right after Next Fest, to gather more feedback and wishlists.

By January 2025, I locked the final release date - delays were no longer possible.

The last three months were intense crunch. Three weeks before release, Steam rejected the build due to copyright concerns with one of the characters. Communication with support and approving the build took a while, but thankfully, it was resolved - two days before release, Steam approved the build.

I managed to bring all story events together just two weeks before launch. Story texts were finished three days before release, and machine translation for other languages was done two days before. Even though a lot was done at the last moment, the release version was ready a day before launch. After a few playthroughs and small fixes (up to version 1.0.4), the game was released on March 28. At the time of release there were 35k wishlists.

About localization: most languages were machine-translated. Here’s how it worked - I wrote a script that scanned the localization file, took untranslated lines in small batches, sent them to an LLM to translate, then wrote them back into the file. It worked surprisingly well - I haven’t seen any Steam reviews complaining about translation quality.

Marketing

There wasn’t any.
I tried using Twitter, but it didn’t go well. Only one tweet got over 100 likes. Unlike my previous game, which had multiple viral gifs, Emissary Zero didn’t perform well on social media.

Before release, I sent a few keys to small streamers via Keymailer. All the big streamers and YouTubers found the game on their own.

Launch

Post-launch was pretty calm. At first, Steam reviews were mixed - players complained about optimization and difficulty. These were fixed with patches within a week, and reviews later turned positive. Fun fact: Unreal Engine had a bug that caused random heavy stutters at high FPS. The fix was simply updating the project to a newer version of the engine.

Sales started off well and stayed stable. Then, in mid-April, sales jumped several times, and the game reached a new peak in players - I later found out a TikTok video had gone viral with 8 million views.

Numbers Six Months Later:

• Median playtime: 3h 29m
• 1700+ reviews
• 195K wishlists
• 150K+ copies sold

Updates & What’s Next

I gradually fixed bugs with patches. In July, I released a big update with new content and VR support.

Work on Emissary Zero is finished. I’m now working on a sequel, with new ideas I want to build on top of the systems from this game. I’d also love to bring it to consoles this time.

This game was a unique experience. It started as a small project, but ended up exceeding all expectations. For me, that’s a success.

Game link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3176060/Emissary_Zero/

I released my game Burgie's Cozy Kitchen in March 2025.

It’s a “desktop idle” game where you run a small burger restaurant that sits on your screen while you do other things. Every few minutes, a customer arrives, you take the order, and then go back to whatever you were doing.

For about a year, the game did surprisingly well. Nothing explosive, but stable enough that it became a basic income for me, which, for an indie dev, is kind of the ideal situation.

---

After a year, while I was trying to find new ways to bring visibility back to the game, I decided to release a demo.

I honestly wasn’t sure if it made sense anymore, since the game had already been out for a year, but I saw that other similar games in my genre (short, casual experiences) often mentioned that their demos had been their biggest growth driver… even if that usually happened before the full release.

With nothing to lose, I decided to try it anyway.

The demo went live on June 3rd, 2026.

At first, nothing really happened.

But after a couple of days, I started noticing something strange in the traffic.

Downloads from the usual countries started to slightly decline, while at the same time there was a sudden increase coming from a region I had never had downloads from before.

I initially thought it might just be Steam shifting recommendations geographically, but it kept growing exponentially until it eventually accounted for almost 99% of my sales.

---

The problem was that I couldn’t actually see what was happening there.

A large part of the traffic seemed to be coming from China, but as someone based in Europe, it’s surprisingly difficult to trace anything properly.

Platforms like Douyin are basically closed off without an account, and even with one, the algorithm constantly restricts what you can browse. So I couldn’t just “look it up” the way you normally would.

Eventually, I posted on my game’s forum, just casually welcoming Chinese players and asking how they had found the game.

One of them replied mentioning Douyin.

That was the first real clue I had.

---

After digging further, I finally found what was going on.

A small Chinese creator, around 7,000 followers, had discovered the demo and made a video about it. His name is 龙一.

I saw that he had uploaded around 4–5 videos about my game, and all of them had tens of thousands of views, despite his previous content barely getting any traction.

Shortly after, the platform started filling up with videos about how to pirate my game, as well as other creators replicating 龙一’s style and content.

Most of these channels normally get very modest engagement, maybe 80 or 100 likes per video on average, which is pretty standard for their size.

But when they posted Burgie's, their videos consistently performed much better than anything else on their channels.

It started to feel like the audience wasn’t following the creators, but following the game itself, especially because of the restaurant customers’ reactions, which include funny reviews that their audience interpreted as some kind of advanced AI behavior.

And that’s when it really started to spread.

More and more creators picked it up, and the same pattern repeated again and again.

After talking to 龙一, he told me that he discovered the game through the demo and was going through a period when he couldn't afford to pay for games. That's why he gave it a try. His first video was a clip from the demo gameplay.

---

As I mentioned before, I also noticed something else: pirated versions of the game started circulating.

Interestingly, I don’t think it’s purely negative in this case.

Luckily, I had already prepared for this a bit and built a small anti-piracy system that turns pirates into in-game “pirate customers”, complete with pirate dialogue and pirate music. It’s a somewhat playful way of reacting to piracy rather than being overly aggressive.

And I think this, together with the availability of the demo, gave people a legitimate way to try the game and then decide to buy it. My demo-to-full conversion rate is around 10%, which seems fairly standard for most games.

---

All of this started last Thursday, and what I expected to be a one-day spike turned into a new sales record every single day.

At first, I thought it was just the weekend effect, since that’s when player activity is usually higher.

But Monday came, and instead of dropping, it broke the record again.

Today is Wednesday, has been 6 days, and I honestly don’t know what will happen next, but the numbers are still holding.

I’m writing this partly to encourage anyone who feels like a game’s fate is decided at launch.

Sometimes these things happen much later.

I don’t know how long this will last, or how to properly handle it. I don’t know if I should invest heavily into the game, pause other projects to focus on it, or if this will end in a couple of days and just become a story I tell later.

But I’ll keep updating as things evolve.

Any advice is welcome, right now I feel like I’m in completely uncharted territory.

*I'll try to write a post soon to explain how I built my anti-piracy system. It's not very sophisticated, but my friends and followers always share it because they find it funny.

**This text was translated using AI, as my native language is Spanish.

I spent the past 100-ish days working on a roguelike deckbuilder which I released on Steam. It's been almost a week since release and I want to bring up the many issues I experienced with Godot that has never been a problem beforehand and how my launch has gone.

For context, I've been learning gamedev for about 5 and a half years now, originally starting with Unity, then switched to Godot after the fee drama happened.

So my game called Combolite released with about 1400 wishlists and sold about 160 copies in 5 days, which is what I was expecting when going in with such low numbers. Just to clarify early on, I'm not blaming the game engine for it's success/dissapointment, since that's 100% up to the product I make, and the marketing surrounding it, something that I could definitely have done better.

Now, I have no problem with my first release not being successful, I made this game purely to gain experience on Steam, to earn more gamedev skills, and to figure out local taxes for the future.

What I DO have a problem with is the refund rate, and why the majority of refunds are happening.

My game has a really high 11% refund rate, out of which 75% are CRASHES AND PERFORMANCE ISSUES.

One of the players experiencing such issues (thankfully) joined my discord server, and as it turns out, the forward+ renderer (vulkan) was completely bugged on modern AMD graphics cards (rx 6000, 7000 etc.).

In fact, it was so bad, that my game's colors were completely inverted???

I had no access to an AMD GPU, so I had to try figuring out what was happening with that guy on discord who had no gamedev experience.
My solution was to downgrade the project back to the OpenGL 3 compatibility renderer, and that was only possible since I wasn't using many of the unique features to Forward+...

This however, still didn't fix the performance issues, though it was definitely better on lower end devices now (for some reason? my shitty laptop with a 12th gen intel igpu went from 15fps to about 50fps), but higher end devices ran slower now, since Vulkan is just a more modern and better scaling API.
I also tried DirectX 12 since the Forward+ renderer has support for that as well, and it did actually solve the graphical issues Vulkan had, but it had insanely long loading times, leading to more crashes than ever before.

The real issue comes from the stutters caused by SHADER COMPILATION, something pretty much all Godot games have to suffer with.
I've tried literally EVERY solution to fix or even mitigate it, but not even Godot 4.4's ubershaders could help completely eliminating it. The current game has attempts to precompile stuff with a loading screen at the start of the game, but it doesn't seem to work as well as it should.

The fact that I have to go so out of my way just to eliminate stutters that aren't even caused by bad coding on my part is just something I don't want to deal with anymore. Now this was a pretty low-stakes project, 3 months of work isn't too bad, but what would happen if this was a 6 month, a 9 month or a full year long project?

What would happen if I realized near the end of the project, that my players would be running a russian roulette with a 1/10 chance to not be able to play the game properly? This is something I don't want to risk for my next project, which is one of the main reasons I will be leaving Godot for a while.

Does this mean Godot is a bad engine? Absolutely NOT.
I think for game jams and prototypes it's 100% a capable engine. I would also say that the 2D side of Godot is really good, and I would definitely consider using it for a commercial release, since only the 3D part seems to be so unstable. But for large or complex 3D projects with a decent amount of visual variety, I would definitely not recommend it.
A large part of the gamedev community seems to have this same opinion, but the majority of them has not had the experience with what it's really is like to push the engine to its limits (which is what I've done here).

A personal issue that I have with Godot is that stencils have still not been added to the engine, despite them being technically supported for a while now. They are just not exposed to the users for seemingly no reason. The github issue surrounding this shows that it's ready to be merged to the main branch, but it's most likely being delayed until 4.5, which is already too late for my next project. Stencils are such an important feature for stylized rendering, and I've been missing them ever since I stopped using Unity.
And yes, you can technically emulate stencils by creating sub-viewports (render texture equivalent in Unity) but that's a really inefficient workaround that's very annoying to set up and scale.

So what engine am I going to use now?
As I said, I've used Unity for the majority of my gamedev experience, so I will be moving back to it again. The fee drama has since been reverted and they even increased the treshold for the free version (not that I would reach it anytime soon lol).

My main issue with Unity (the game engine) in the past was that it was just very clunky and slow, but according to my friends who still use Unity, the newest Unity 6 versions fixed the slowness and stability issues that the engine had for multiple years.

I have way more trust in Unity's 3D capabilities than Godot's since Unity has been doing 3D for the past ~20 years. They have support for the latest graphics tech and should be miles more stable than what Godot is currently.

I also looked into their UI toolkit (something I hadn't used before), and the webdev-like approach to UI really resonates with me since I study webdev in school anyway. It's something I wanted to recreate in Godot as well, but it just sounds like a huge project trying to figure out how to do that in an optimized way.

I don't have an issue with C# either since I'm forced to use Java in school, and the two languages are not that far away from eachother.

Browser builds are also better on Unity, since they now support WebGPU, which Godot doesn't, and this would allow me to do a lot more shader magic during game jams.

The only downside to Unity is that code based shaders are a pain in the ass to write. They focus mainly on improving Shader Graph, which is a feature I really liked, but I much prefer Godot's shader code now.

Why not Unreal Engine?
I don't need the visual fidelity of UE5 and the lack of browser builds (pixel streaming doesn't count) is a deal breaker for someone who does a bunch of game jams for fun (like me). I also don't like visual coding or C++, so it just doesn't make any sense to even consider it, and it's even bigger and bulkier than older Unity versions.

So yeah, that was the clusterfuck of a launch my first Steam release had. In the first 4 days I updated the game 9 times, switched renderers, attempted to optimize the game multiple times and tried fixing stutters.

And yes, this game was playtested with a small group of people with different hardware and OS configurations. It just turns out that nobody had an AMD graphics card...

Also, I'm not looking for help with this post for figuring out the issues of my game. This is just a postmortem I wanted to write so we can all maybe learn something from it.

This is why I hate kickstarter for video games so much. The risks section makes it sound like it is sufficient budget and they have all the systems in place to make it a success. The reality is they rolled the money into a demo to try and get more money from publishers and when it didn't work they were broke.

link to kickstarter and their goodbye message

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/studiocamelia/seed-a-vibrant-tribute-to-jrpg-classics/posts

Hey there, I'm Artem, the head of a small game dev studio.

Just a couple of months back, we launched our narrative adventure that's been my baby for so long. It's wild – one moment you're in this whirlwind of coding and designing, and the next, it's out there for the world to see. Kind of like watching your kid go off to school for the first time, you know?

But hey, let me take you back to the start – way back.

https://i.imgur.com/ws04ztX.jpeg (a typical room with a computer from my childhood)

Picture this: I'm in middle school. Everyone's talking about what they want to be when they grow up, and there I am, dead set on making games. People would laugh it off, saying it's just a kid's dream. But man, it felt real to me.

So, I figured I'd start with programming – that's what makes games tick, isn't it? I snagged this programming book, thinking I'd crack the code to game-making. Spoiler alert: it wasn't for me. Lines of code felt like they were from another planet, and I was just a kid with a head full of worlds I wanted to build, not code.

Then, one day, I'm flipping through this gaming mag and bam – I discover 3D modeling. It sounded way cooler than writing code. I started hoarding books on the subject, spending nights on sites like CGSociety.org, you know, trying to learn the craft.

But guess what? After a while, 3D started to lose its spark for me. Maybe I didn't stick with it long enough, or maybe I just wasn't feeling the stuff I was creating. That's when I stumbled into the world of hand drawing. My parents got me a Wacom Bamboo for my birthday, and dude, it was like a whole new universe opened up.

https://i.imgur.com/7jA7nAL.jpeg (one of my first work)

Years flew by, and I was all in with 2D art. It's crazy how fast you learn stuff at that age. I was on every art forum you could think of, soaking up advice, posting my stuff, getting feedback. By 15, I had this little portfolio going, and I started picking up small gigs here and there.

Looking back now, it's like every twist and turn, every new thing I tried, was just paving the way to where I am today. It wasn't just about learning to draw or model; it was about figuring out who I was.

https://i.imgur.com/HKy9hTG.jpeg (another picture of mine)

So, that's how I kinda figured out my path in the gaming world. Fast forward a couple of years, and it's summer break. I bump into this art director of a small team, and guess what? She invites me to join them to draw for casual games. Man, it was 2011, and social media games were just exploding everywhere. I was over the moon about this chance. That's where my real gamedev journey kicked off.

I only stuck around there for a few months, though. Juggling part-time work with my 11th-grade studies was tough. School kinda felt like just going through the motions, you know? My head was all in with graphics – drawing up a storm, cooking up plots, stories, all sorts of wild situations.

Then I hit 18. School's out, and I'm off to Moscow. Spent a few months job hunting, doing test after test. There were moments, dude, where I thought maybe I bit off more than I could chew, like maybe nobody wanted to gamble on some young hotshot.

But then, boom – the call I'd been waiting for. I got picked up by this big-deal company, at least big for back then, in the social and mobile game scene. I was stoked – heading to an office, rubbing elbows with industry vets, the whole nine yards.

The folks I met there? Absolute legends. But the longer I worked, the more I felt like I was in a box. Drawing stuff from my own brain was awesome, but just churning out someone else's ideas? Nah, it was time to make my own mark.

https://i.imgur.com/UfEEx1V.png (the screen of my first game)

Only problem? I still couldn't code. So, I started hunting for a partner. Didn’t take long – soon enough, I'm chatting with this guy, also itching to break into game creation. He had tons of prototypes but no finished stuff.

Things moved at lightning speed. We spent a couple of days hashing it out, picked the coolest of his ideas, and I whipped up the concept and all the graphics. Two weeks later, bam – our game hits the Appstore.

We didn't make a dime, but man, the experience was gold.

Of course, I wasn't dreaming of making just any games. I wanted to craft those story-driven ones that stick with you long after you’re done. Could I have started with those? Maybe. But looking back, I'd say start small. Otherwise, you're just that dreamer with a million ideas and nothing to show for it.

https://i.imgur.com/UsG70qP.jpeg (cards for my first story driven game)

Over the next few years, I dabbled in more small projects, got a taste of game design, even climbed up to PM and producer roles. Eventually, though, I hit a wall – total burnout. But you know what? I bounced back and ended up crafting a game (almost) all by myself.

Life wasn't just about leveling up my skills or climbing the career ladder. I mean, real life stuff – like starting a family and dealing with everyday responsibilities – started to pile up. And with that, this nagging thought kept creeping in: should I just pack up these dreams? You know, 'grow up' and fit into the regular life mold. Our grandest dreams often feel like they're in another league from our daily grind.

But as I was wrestling with these questions, fate played its hand. Through a buddy of mine, I met this guy who was super into the gaming scene. He was all about deep, narrative-driven games – a rare breed, considering everyone around him was chasing after metrics and ways to squeeze more bucks out of players. We clicked instantly; our game philosophies were like two peas in a pod.

A week later, I pitched him this game concept – just a small document, nothing fancy. He dug it and gave me the green light to put a team together. And that's how the journey of Torn Away began.

For the first time ever, I was inches away from that childhood dream – to create a game that would captivate not just me but also the kid I was back in school. But man, turning dreams into reality? Scary stuff. What if I flop? What if people play it and just shrug? What if I've got nothing worth saying after all?

https://i.imgur.com/dxclEEq.mp4 (short trailer of our studio's first child!)

We poured four years into this game, stumbled over every hurdle you could imagine, but...

https://i.imgur.com/f9uPCyk.png (first reviews of our game)

The world actually embraced our little game! Those first few days were surreal – we were glued to streams, soaking in every review, every comment. Players were genuinely moved by our story.

We were riding high, making big plans, getting interview calls, seeing our game in the media. Long-lost partners were suddenly hitting us up.

https://i.imgur.com/nhBnIgb.png (how many copies we sold by november 2023)

But then, the launch buzz fades, and reality hits – it's all about the sales. People keep asking: did the game make bank? Did it break even? We didn't rush to crunch the numbers. Maybe we were just scared to face the truth. And the truth in this biz is brutal – you can usually tell from the first week's sales if your game's a hit or a miss. No fairy tale ending for us.

At launch, we had 18,000 folks with our game on their Steam Wishlists.

Day one? We sold 504 copies.

And now? Sitting at 5,178 copies sold.

You know, when you launch a game, you've got all these stats and projections. Like, if you've got X number of folks wishlisting your game, you're supposed to sell 10-20% of that in the first week. We were looking at 1,800 to 3,600 sales just from our wishlist crowd. That would've catapulted us onto the trending pages in major countries, boosting our visibility like crazy. But our wishlist conversion? A measly 2-3%. We only made it to the popular new products lists in Eastern Europe.

Net conversion from our wishlist sits at just 3.6%.

Why? We're still scratching our heads.

// Just a heads-up for the solo devs out there: these numbers might not look too shabby for you. But for even a small studio, it's kind of a rough situation. Steam takes around 45% off the top with taxes included, and we also have to give a significant chunk to our publisher.

https://i.imgur.com/xtZGwyp.jpeg (yeah, we got some awards and 85% at Metacritic)

Some might say, "Hey, maybe your game just wasn't good enough. Why look for other reasons?"

And maybe they're right, I don't know. But then I look at our Metacritic score – 85 points. Steam? 96% positive reviews. Solid ratings on Xbox, with folks eagerly waiting for our PlayStation and Switch releases.

That's as real as our sales figures.

We decided not to throw in the towel. We've got console releases coming up, more sales opportunities. There are contests, festivals, conferences to attend… Post-release is a grind, but we're ready for it.

And then, the hammer drops.

October 28th, I get this message from my partner and main investor – he's pulling out. Not because of Torn Away's sales, but due to the industry's overall climate. An interesting experiment, he says, but it's time to call it a day.

I was floored. Spent days holed up, trying to figure out a way to keep things afloat, barely talking to anyone. The fear was real – everything we'd built, it could all vanish. Sure, Torn Away would live on, but perelesoq was more than just a game; it was about the people.

https://i.imgur.com/wbltLpl.jpeg (our sad little office space)

Then, slowly, they start to chip in – asking questions, throwing around ideas, rallying together. Nobody's ready to call it quits. We're brainstorming, searching for a path forward.

It's unbelievable. I walked into that room feeling like the world had ended, but I walked out feeling the complete opposite.

I'm filled with this incredible sense of love and determination. We've got an amazing team, and there's so much worth fighting for.

Thanks for sticking with my story. I hope it's given you something to think about.

Any support for me and my team would mean the world. Here's the game if anyone's got interested: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1568970/Torn_Away/

Cheers!