zukalous

I will be honest, I don’t get Early Access. Why would teams want to subject themselves to that exposure to the community with an unfinished game? How do you navigate having the game feel good and have enough content but not TOO much content? However, the Ghost Ship Games and Continue Reading

Spirit City: Lofi Sessions launched 1 week ago today and has already sold over 55,000 units. In fact, within the first 4 days it already sold 40,000 copies. The game is developed by Mooncube Games, a small, 3-person team from Montreal, Canada. The studio was created in 2021 by Keith Continue Reading

Success metrics Last month, the developers behind the Deep Rock Galactic Survivor (DRG:S) announced that they sold over 1,000,000 copies of their game since its February Launch. DRG:S is an survivor-like (aka action-roguelike) (aka bullet-heaven) (aka Vampire Survivors-like) spinoff of the mega-popular 2018 co-op FPS: Deep Rock Galactic. Shortly after Continue Reading

Every year, I look at how many games have launched and how many have reached “Real Steam” (which I arbitrarily pick as having 1000+ reviews.) This year I want to track it throughout the year. Are we on track to have a blockbuster year of hit games? Is AI going Continue Reading

This is my rolling blog post of all the talks and interesting bits I learned while attending GDC 2024. Consider this your free conference pass. Impromptu User Study: My Uber Driver In my 25-minute ride from SFO to my hotel I had a really nice driver who was a Steam Continue Reading

GDC is right around the corner. If you are going, or any other in-person game convention, business cards are part of every new encounter with a fellow attendee. There is this cool trick you can do where you print business cards with a unique steam key on them so that Continue Reading

A lot of my post-mortems are for games that have HUGE launches where they sell 100,000 copies in their first week. It is a fantastic result but many more indies would be happy just earning a sustainable middle-class income that allows them to make more games. Is that possible? Does Continue Reading

Pal world is the most-played non-valve game on Steam right now (526,000 players) Why? Developer Pocketpair found a perfectly unmet desire in the marketplace: Pokemon… but with Guns.   Now any time a game hits it big people immediately try to think they might be able to replicate that success. Continue Reading

TikTok has proven to be a potent source of wishlists (read case studies of going viral on TikTok here and some TikTok tips here). However, this week I have a new TikTok strategy to potentially earn thousands of wishlists: leveraging TikTok influencers. The team behind cozy room decorator game Momento, Continue Reading