A lot of my post-mortems are for games that have HUGE launches where they sell 100,000 copies in their first week. It is a fantastic result but many more indies would be happy just earning a sustainable middle-class income that allows them to make more games. Is that possible? Does steam only give out success or failure and not anything in between?
In today’s post I want to cover the story of Jon Nielsen and the great story of WitchHand’s launch which earned him $90,000 in the first week. He first shared this story as a twitter thread but I reached out to him to tell me more about his great story.
I was really fascinated because he built his way up to success across multiple games that have been released within about 1 year of each other. This is exactly the stay small, stay nimble, release quickly and often model I wrote about with John Romero and the missing middle.
So here are seven lessons we can learn from Jon Nielsen’s work:
Lesson 1: Release more games
Obviously making a game is harder than riding a bike. Even so, you still crashed your bike hundreds of times before you learned how to stay up long enough to ride around the block. So why do we expect our first games to be a success?
You have to release multiple games that will “crash” before you expect to have any form of success.
I show this chart a lot but it is very important to internalize. Most studios shut down or developers give up before they release a second game.
Jon Nielsen’s strategy is perfect and he did just that: he has released 3 games since he started making his own in 2021.
| Games | Steam Page start | Release date | Days coming-soon page was live | Wishlists at launch | Peak concurrent users | Total Reviews |
| Lost Nova | April 15, 2021 | May 11, 2022 | 391 | 10,000 | 130 | 153 |
| Mechanibot | Dec 10, 2021 | Aug 31, 2022 | 264 | 2000 | 21 | 48 |
| WitchHand | Jun 10, 2023 | Feb 7, 2024 | 242 | 9900 | 750 | 222 |
As you can see, his development time is getting shorter and the revenue he is earning is trending up. It takes a while to learn how to make games.
Here is how he made each game
Lost Nova
My first game, Lost Nova, was my dream game. It was exactly what I wanted it to be. I knew it had the potential to be successful because of games like A Short Hike, but I wasn’t so concerned about that. Unfortunately for me, wholesome games about talking to little apple dudes didn’t pay the bills. I needed to make games with deeper mechanics that people spent more time in.
Jon Nielsen
Typically starting with your dream game is risky because it leads to endless rework because the vision a developer has in their head never matches their beginner’s skill level. Jon worked in the industry for years as an illustrator before starting Lost Nova. I think that helped him understand scope and how to make games that look polished.
Mechanibot
It’s rough to admit but I think Mechanibot had some design issues with its core gameplay mechanics. I was still learning how to make gameplay-focused games. The foundations of it are still good though and I’d love to make some sort of Mechanibot spinoff/remake some day.
Jon Nielsen
WitchHand
WitchHand instantly had a different vibe around it. The reactions to the first gifs I shared, the messages and comments I got, there was a real excitement in the air that I didn’t feel with my other games. And people LOVED the demo. It had a median play time of 2 hours. Many people told me they played it for more than 10! Can you imagine playing a free demo for 10 hours??
Jon Nielsen
I hear this all the time. This is what I call “The Magic.” Some game ideas just take off without much marketing. People are begging you to give them more information.
Lesson 2: Set scope and stick to it
How does Jon get 3 games out in 3 years?
What works for me is keeping to a schedule and planning everything out early on. Fully understand the foundations and scope of your game before beginning. And try to take weekends off!
Jon Nielsen
Lesson 3: Stay small
The longer you work on a game and the more people you work with, the greater the success a game must be to break even. The monthly cost to run your studio is your burn rate.
You cannot control how many copies your game will sell, but you do have control over the burn rate and the scope of your game. It is much easier to control costs than it is to predict success.
Jon keeps it extremely lean. It helps that his art is amazing and that he can code. But you must find ways to keep things tight.
I did the art, design, and programming while my partner Topher Anselmo did the soundtrack and additional programming. He’s the best.
Jon Nielsen
Lesson 4: Follow Steam marketing best practices
The WitchHand marketing follows a very tried and true tactic of releasing a demo early in the marketing cycle, getting youtubers to play it and entering into festivals. As you can see, he entered the last Next Fest before launch, got into popular upcoming, and got good YouTube coverage.
Here is WitchHand’s cumulative wishlist chart.
This is the process I teach in my Wishlist & Visibility Masterclass.
Recently I have been looking at how games fare in the Discovery Queue (DQ) because it is one of the most potent widgets that Steam uses to direct traffic to your page. Here is what the DQ did traffic wise in the week after launch.
Notice that the highest peak happened the day after launch and then traffic slowly slowly fell back down. The slow decay of traffic is good. For games that underperform the DQ falls like a rock. But, for games that really catch on and become those $1,000,000 sellers I typically see the DQ double every day for at least a week.
For more information on the discovery queue check these out:
Lesson 5: Fast follow successful games
I don’t think I did anything too special for this game. The best decision I made was at the very start with the genre and aesthetic. Should everyone make Stacklands-likes? Maybe not (tho I’m surprised I haven’t seen more)
Jon Nielsen
WitchHand belongs to a new solo-card-resource-management genre that was pioneered by Cultist Simulator in 2018, then expanded and simplified by Stacklands.
We are still at the point of the genre where there is no name for it, instead people just call it a “-like” or list the games that pioneered it. We used to say “doom-clones” to describe FPSs back in the 90s.
I pulled some positive WitchHand reviews where people say how much they love how WitchHand is the next evolutionary step in the line of the pioneer games. Notice that they don’t say UGH STUPID CLONER! They like that this game is so similar to other games they love.
I think this card-management type of game is an excellent genre for small teams just starting out. Here is why:
- It isn’t very art-asset heavy (you don’t need a fully rigged character), you just need some good 2D art to put on the cards.
- The gameplay loop of combining resources to output a new resource is the bedrock of just about every crafting game. This is a good place to learn how to design and code this type of gameplay.
- The fun of the game comes from dealing with the input randomness that can be endlessly generated by different combinations of cards.
- Because of the randomness, these games naturally have long median playtimes which play well in the Steam algorithm and with Streamers.
- It is a great stepping stone to bigger more difficult games to make like 4X, Open World Survival Craft, and city builders. You can practice designing these types of games with a simpler card-management game without having to build out so many of the systems that are required for those other bigger genres.
- It is a new genre with fans that are hungry for more games like this one.
- The genre “anchors” haven’t been crystalized yet so there is a lot of room for innovation and experimentation.
- You don’t have to do complex gameplay coding like combat, jumping, physics. One of the biggest struggles for new teams is getting “game feel” right. Done wrong combat can feel “janky” or “slippery” and you will get bad reviews. With this card-based gameplay, the interaction is all performed with the mouse doing clicks, drags, and zooms.
Lesson 6: Tiny innovations
You can’t just clone a hit game but at the same time, new teams shouldn’t try to reinvent a brand new genre whole cloth (it is too tricky, I document the risk of creating new genres here).
I think part of the reason Mechanibot underperformed is it changed too much from other genres. It was trying too many new mechanics.
Instead, WitchHand followed a genre but changed JUST enough to make it unique and interesting:
I can’t stop from putting my own flavor and style into everything I do. That alone is worth something, I think. I had a rule for myself when making WitchHand not to redo features and mechanics from Stacklands without fully examining each one. I couldn’t just be like “well they did it this way so I’ll do it that way too.” And of course I made my own changes to certain aspects that I wasn’t the biggest fan of. I didn’t like having to open the glossary for recipes so I turned the recipes into cards. I didn’t like the Buy and Sell buttons being locked in place on the board and often off screen so I made them part of the UI.
Jon Nielsen
Lesson 7: Watch out for genre mixing
Side note: According to Jon, Lost Nova underperformed his expectations. He was hoping to make another simple wholesome game like A Short Hike. Why didn’t Lost Nova take off? It looks good, it is wholesome like A Short Hike. It takes place in beautiful forests. It has that pastel color palette required by all wholesome games!
I don’t have data for this but my gut tells me that as a genre, Cozy / Wholesome games, must walk a very very fine line. Deviate too far from what makes a cozy game cozy and fans will ignore it. I also think it seems silly, but the main character uses a gun. Yes it is a peaceful, calming, charming tool, that looks like a 1950s scifi ray gun, but there is just some unwritten rule about wholesome games where you can’t use “shoot” as a gameplay verb.
Here is a quick set of verbs that in my experience cozy / wholesome games cannot have:
| VERBS ALLOWED | VERBS NOT ALLOWED |
| ✔ Farm | ❌Kill |
| ✔ Decorate | ❌Shoot |
| ✔ Explore | ❌Attack |
| ✔ Craft | ❌Destroy |
| ✔ Talk | |
| ✔ Organize |
Lost Nova demonstrates that shoot / space / lasers are not cozy. I think these cozy games must take place in a familiar, every-day, location that is highly relatable. Because Lost Nova was set in a foreign planet with weird (but still cute) scifi creatures, the game violated one of the unwritten expectations of the audience.
Think about it, wholesome games are bucolic but base on Earth:
- Stardew Valley
- Ooblets
- Spiritfarer
I can’t think of any wholesome games that have guns. There is a vacuum “gun” in Slime Rancher but it is super cute.
Making games is hard because you have to deal with the weirdness of humans. It can be a totally fun game but if it doesn’t tickle our brains in just the right way, we reject it. A tiny deviation from what the brain wants and it is indifferent to it. It’s like if you add just a bit too much salt to a soup, it goes from savory and delicious to disgusting. The same goes for games. If just one ingredient is out of line, the brain says “NOPE”
On the other side of it, I think WitchHand does so well because it correctly navigates the river between following genre and theme, while still innovating.
Wholesome witches making potions and crafting spells is a very popular theme and the gameplay of combining objects to make new ones fits perfectly with the witching theme that fans love.
Also, Steam LOVES crafty-buildy-simulationy games. They love deep games. WitchHand is Jon’s most complex game and it is also his most successful. Look at this screenshot! This is the complexity that Steam players crave!
My advice to developers is to pay attention to genre and theme very closely. Adding just one tiny element that conflicts with a genre can have HUGE impacts on the perception of your game. This is also why I think mixing genres is actually riskier than most developers assume; it increases the possibility that you will have conflicting genre / theme / mechanics.
What’s next
The key to the rapid release strategy like Jon is to stay nimble. If a game underperforms, start the next one, and repeat until you find traction.
Jon now has traction. Sow what to do now? Double down and keep updating WitchHand? Move on to game 4?
I’m definitely going to keep making games. It’s a ton of fun. It’s the best way I’ve found to tap into all the skills I’ve accidentally picked up over the years all at once. I don’t have any grand plans of going big and forming a studio. I’m going to continue keeping it on the smaller side with games that don’t take me and my friend Topher longer than 1-2 years to finish. With WitchHand getting a bit of attention, I’m super curious to see how the big update I’m working on performs but I’m sure it won’t be long before I’m starting I’m game 4.
Jon Nielsen
BONUS Comment: What could be improved
Jon is doing an amazing job releasing multiple games at a steady pace. I think this is the best way to have a long-term career in this industry. One of the strengths of this approach is that you are building a catalog so that when someone discovers one of your games there is a chance they buy ALL your games.
Therefore, it is critical that you make it easy for people to find all your games.
There were a couple minor improvements that Jon could make to increase the sell through.
I was a little disappointed that the main menu of his game doesn’t have a button that says something like “More From Jon” and it opens up his Studio page.
Also, since he now has 3 games, Jon should make a “Jon Nielsen Bundle” where all his games can be purchased at once. It is super easy to setup and provides people with the opportunity to give you more money.
