Every January I pull data from all the games that launched in the previous year to benchmark what happened to track trends and better understand what might happen in the next year. Well I am doing that again. * Correction* 1/26/2023 IMPORTANT CORRECTION. I published this blog post on 1/25/2023 Continue Reading
Why 14,000 games released on Steam in 2023 isn’t that bad
Now that 2023 it is time for our annual tradition of looking at how many games were released on Steam and then saying OH MY GOD THERE WERE 1,212,315,756,687 games released last year. Indie games are over. This is the end. Time to get a real job. If you would Continue Reading
What I learned in 2023
Hi Happy 2024. This blog is really just me documenting what I am thinking and studying in the Steam marketplace. As they say, the best way to learn something is to teach it. So today I want to look back and see what I learned. How much did I write Continue Reading
What I respect about PlayWay
Polish publisher and developer PlayWay wisely realized that nobody actually knows which game is going to be a best seller or why, so, their business model is centered on quickly creating a bunch of Steam pages for half-baked game concepts. Then they only spend resources developing the ones that get Continue Reading
Why Educational Games Don’t Work on Steam
Here is a situation: you are a parent who knows how to make video games. You have a young child and you make a little computer game for them. And they love it! It is educational in nature, safe for kids, and they are excited to hang out with you. Continue Reading
Why am I not getting wishlists? A step by step solution
So here you are reading my blog every week and time after time I write about these games that are doing amazingly well! They earn 100 or even 300 PER DAY! They launch with 100,000 wishlists. Then, maybe you look at your own Steamworks stats and see a paltry 1 Continue Reading
Part 2: What games should former AAA developers make when they go indie
If you were laid off from your AAA job, are thinking of starting an indie studio, and are struggling to decide what type of game to make, I wrote today’s blog post just for you. In last week’s blog I explained how different the indie game space is from the Continue Reading
My advice to AAA-developers trying to make indie games
8 Quick Tips That Could Save Your Studio’s Life It is so sad to see all the AAA layoffs. I am so sorry if you were affected. If you need a slight bit of consolation, there was some research that the folks at Freakanomics did where they studied people who were Continue Reading
Deconstructing the underwhelming launch of a automation builder game
I write a lot about games that succeed. For example, you can read about the millions made by Peglin, Tape 2 Tape, Cosmoteer, Battlebit, and Dwarves here. But there is always that one guy that yells “SURVIVORSHIP BIAS!” because I never cover the games that don’t succeed. One of the Continue Reading
The other game that succeeded during the Starfield launch
Starfield Launched on September 6th, 2023. It will arguably be one of the biggest launches this year. I have written about how I think Indies over-emphasize their release date and are overly cautious when it comes to launching along side a AAA release. In today’s blog I want to look Continue Reading