For the alien conspiracy-curious and ufologists among us, this plot will sound all too familiar. Ever since the 2017 New York Times article on the Pentagon’s UFO program, there has been a renewed and widely publicized discussion around the possibility of disclosure: the day when the world’s governments finally admit what they’ve long known about non-human intelligence and release a trove of previously classified evidence.

While premiering a trailer for Disclosure Day, Spielberg commented:

“I used to say to myself, ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful if all of this turned out to be true?’ I now say to myself, ‘All of this is true.’”

So aliens are real.1 What exactly are we waiting for? Why isn’t everyone freaking out? I think it has something to do with how difficult it is to metabolize reality-shifting information. Miracles are happening all around us every day. SpaceX is catching rockets out of the sky. We’re walking around with supercomputers in our pockets. AI is solving previously unsolvable math problems. We’re watching astronauts livestream from deep space as they journey to the far side of the Moon. We are constantly confronted with information that should completely rearrange our sense of reality. How do we process it all? And what do we do next?

In a TED Talk, famed climber Alex Honnold tells the story of two of his most famous climbs, beginning with Half Dome in Yosemite National Park. Half Dome has two distinct sides: one features a popular hiking trail that can be completed by an average but prepared hiker in about a day. The other, the Northwest Face, is a nearly vertical 2,000-foot wall and a popular route for advanced climbers. In 2008, Honnold became the first person to climb the route free solo, completely alone without ropes or protective gear. Upon reaching the summit, he planned to descend the normal hiking route on the other side. He recalls pulling himself over the edge of the wall, finding himself among a group of ordinary hikers who were completely unaware of what he had just done:

Normally when you summit Half Dome, you have a rope and a bunch of climbing gear on you. And tourists gasp and they flock around you for photos. This time, I popped over the edge shirtless, panting, jacked, I was amped, but nobody batted an eye. I looked like a lost hiker that was too close to the edge. I was surrounded by people talking on cell phones and having picnics. I felt like I was in a mall. I took off my tight climbing shoes and started hiking back down. And that’s when people stopped me: ‘You’re hiking barefoot, that’s so hardcore.’ I didn’t bother to explain.

There is a phenomenon among astronauts called the Overview Effect. The term was coined by author Frank White after interviewing astronauts about the transformative effects of seeing Earth from space. White says: “Astronauts who witness Earth from this perspective first-hand often report an intense state of self-transcendent awe and wonder.” White describes the experience further on NASA’s podcast:

I suppose one of the most important insights was that if we want people to understand the overview effect in a way that will lead to changes in their behavior, we have to have them experience it. Now, it’s like Zen Buddhism. If you know anything about Zen Buddhism, every Zen master will say, Zen is beyond words. And then they proceed to talk about it. Or they write books about it. So I really believe the overview effect is beyond words.

I am neither a rock climber nor an astronaut. But I’m a frequent experiencer of this feeling of wordless wonder, and I hope you are too. Not at the scale of Half Dome or standing on the moon looking back at Earth, but in smaller moments. Maybe while listening to your favorite song on a drive at sunset, during a late-night conversation with a friend, or in the first glimpse of a rainbow after summer rain.

Even if Disclosure Day came tomorrow, we would still be the same strange apes, trying to metabolize reality through flesh and blood. Maybe the question is not whether we can handle the truth, but what we would do with it. Would it make us more fearful? Or would it make us more curious, more empathetic, and ultimately more human?

We are capable of so much more than we imagine:

In other news this week: what happens when AI makes it easier than ever to ship software? Why does Netflix need 36,000 categories to help people find something to watch? And why are power users already looking beyond the AI tools everyone else gets by default?

Let’s get into it…

• The number of apps released in the App Store have more than doubled this past quarter. Add the App Store to the long list of platforms that have seen meteoric supply side growth coinciding with the AI boom. See also: GitHub, the software development platform, is preparing for 30X growth after quickly realizing that their estimate of 10X was far too low back in February.

• Netflix will continue to use AI to help customers find stuff to watch amongst all the noise. AI content creation hasn’t yet seen widespread adoption in the film and TV industry. I’m sure Netflix anticipates its supply of content to grow even more in the coming years. Netflix has the added benefit of being closed, so Joe Schmo can’t yet upload his homemade summer blockbuster with the click of a button. He still has to go to YouTube for that. Netflix has long understood that finely tuned curation systems are key to keeping users engaged and subscribed month after month. As I covered previously, Netflix has a total of 36,000 category codes to help make sense of all their content. This includes categories like K-Dramas for Beginners (Code 2953105), Small Town Charm (Code 81615585), and Binge-Worthy British Crime TV Shows (Code 1192582). What does this mean for the future? Expect content providers, from movie production companies to individual YouTubers, to continue to “niche down” and embrace hyper-specific subgenres (see Backrooms). Content made for ‘everyone’ but no one in particular is at risk of never breaking through. For those of you following the video game industry closely, and Steam in particular, this phenomenon will be familiar.

• In more Netflix news, the streamer says it has accepted that they won’t work with filmmakers who want theatrical releases. YouTubers are graduating to the big screen, as I covered last week, but Netflix isn’t changing their tune on theatrical releases. Dan Lin, chairman of Netflix film, said that Greta Gerwig’s upcoming Narnia will be the exception and doesn’t hint at a broader strategic shift.

• Yet another YouTuber is making their way to the theater. The animated series The Amazing Digital Circus debuted on Netflix and is being shown across 2,230 screens worldwide this week. The series was created by self-taught animator Gooseworx who got his start on YouTube and has over 2 million subscribers. The difference between Netflix and YouTube, obviously, is that the former is a closed ecosystem in which distribution rights are negotiated, whereas the latter relies on audience lock-in—a creator on YouTube can’t move their subscribers off of the platform and onto another one. Neither, for that matter, has much incentive for theatrical releases, other than reminding potential subscribers that they exist.

• A compelling profile on MrBeast’s former short form video soothsayer Rohan Kumar. Highlights include: he never promises results like “500K followers in six months” saying “You can’t guarantee stuff like that. It’s all up to the algo gods.” As the profile describes, he is constantly sliding into people’s DMs, both collaborators and companies, saying “closed mouths don’t get fed.” Kumar’s success comes from a combination of “knowing a guy” for just about everything and, as his 𝕏 bio describes, being a “professional internet surfer.” — “He didn’t study consumer trends in college, but by scrolling memes for 10 years, he has a reference for every client campaign.”

• feels similarly about the importance of “knowing a guy” in her recent post covering career advice for new grads in the AI age. Sun, who previously worked at Substack and is now a freelance journalist, says “Relationships are how you’ll escape the hellfire of a thousand-person LinkedIn resume stack. Relationships are how you earn the trust to make the sale, because even the biggest rationality bros are vibes-based decision-makers.”

• Claude Fable, Anthropic’s watered-down version of their Mythos model which they deemed too powerful to release to the general public, launched on Tuesday. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has been on a years long campaign preaching the dangers of an AI takeover since he was at OpenAI and GPT-2 was similarly deemed too dangerous to release in 2019. GPT-2 was, of course, released later that year and turned out to be… fine? It’s difficult to see Amodei’s efforts as anything other than a play for regulatory capture as Anthropic continues to struggle to gather enough compute to meet demand. Quickly after Fable’s release, it was discovered that Anthropic was silently nerfing queries related to “frontier AI development.” It has since walked this policy back. What does all this mean? For the hardcore users, I think we’ll see a growing interest in local models paired with custom hardware like Truffle, tinybox or the Nvidia AI PC, and the emergence of more open source companies like Prime Intellect and Nous Research. The most hardcore might even train their own models as YouTuber PewDiePie did. The general rule of thumb is that open source models lag 6 months behind releases from the major labs. And what about everyday users? They’ll just stick with whatever Apple or Google provides out of the box.

Images I saved

But I’ll spare you that, for now…

Instead, let’s use MrBeast as a case study for something else I’ve been thinking about: creativity is a prediction market.

But, before we begin, I want to try something. If you could, close your eyes—well metaphorically—since I want you to keep reading. Metaphorically close your eyes and imagine yourself sitting on a beach listening to the sound of the ocean crashing against the shore. You’re on vacation. You’re feeling stress-free. Maybe you’ve got a beer in your hand, or a margarita, or your favorite book. All your troubles and tensions melt away. Imagine your mind “like water” as ancient Eastern philosophy preaches.

Now in this meditative state, I want you to think of MrBeast not as a philanthropy capitalist and poverty porn YouTuber turned chocolatier, as he is typically portrayed. Picture him, instead, as a simple furniture maker. Imagine he’s really into Japanese woodworking. He carefully carves notches out of beams of wood, connecting them together without the need for nails.

Mind like water.

Just as the master furniture maker has an almost cosmic attunement to the grain of his wood and the shape it makes against a seated body, MrBeast has a cosmic attunement to the endless branching nodes of the YouTube algorithm and the mind of a viewer.

Mind like water.

Each MrBeast video is built around a simple viral premise like “Last To Leave Circle Wins $500,000” or “I Built Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory!” On the podcast My First Million, MrBeast describes the thinking behind one of his most viewed videos, “I Spent 7 Days Buried Alive.” The premise for it was: spend seven days sealed inside a coffin, 10 feet underground, buried beneath 20,000 pounds of dirt. But, as he explains it, he could’ve built the video around the same basic physical challenge in a much less interesting way. He could’ve spent seven days lying in a bathtub, for example. One is “super fucking viral” and the other, “no one cares about.”

He goes on to say that this is the power of ideas: with the right idea, you can do the exact same amount of work, but get 50x the return. In a way, MrBeast is gambling. He’s built up a sense over years of what is and isn’t a good idea. By choosing the coffin over the bathtub, he’s attempting to predict the future.

Now you’re probably thinking, duh, of course the coffin wins out over the bathtub. But not all decisions are that obvious. Creating anything, whether it’s a YouTube video or a song in your bedroom or the next summer blockbuster, involves thousands of different decisions. Whether we make those decisions subconsciously, intuitively, or strategically, each one is a small bet. And each bet opens up new pathways for even more bets.

Polymarket founder Shayne Coplan describes prediction markets as a way to take a bunch of disparate opinions and distill them down to one probability. They are, as he says, “The most accurate thing we have as mankind right now, until someone else creates some sort of super crystal ball.” Creative work is a little stranger because the market only exists as a feeling in the creator’s head. There is no crystal ball, let alone a live price for “seven days in a bathtub” vs “seven days buried alive” until you release the thing. And as Hollywood has proven, no one really knows what an audience wants, often not even the audience themselves. All you can do is make a good bet.

The key with making bets is that you have to stay in the game long enough to keep making them. The founder of Coinbase, Brian Armstrong has a philosophy on this: “Action produces information. If you’re unsure of what to do, just do anything, even if it’s the wrong thing. This will give you information about what you should actually be doing.”

Finding creative success is about first finding the game you’re cosmically aligned with. The one with enough creative tension to keep you playing. Then making a bunch of bets again and again and again, until the market starts to reflect your intuition.

Mind like water.

Here are the things I saved:

• Economist Tyler Cowen gave a refreshing 19-minute talk at the Sana AI Summit about the future of work and the economy. He says “AI will not bring mass unemployment, but it will change most jobs.” As Cowen describes, we are in the midst of a radical technological revolution. People may not like the change and uncertainty that comes with such a revolution, but as Kevin Kelly recently suggested, the most important skill for thriving in this new era just might be the ability to navigate and even become comfortable with ambiguity.

• Is the movie business thriving again? AMC recorded its highest attendance for the month of May since 2019. This was, in part, due to the late-month success of two relatively low-budget horror movies by two young directors who got their start on YouTube: Obsession and Backrooms. [The Hollywood Reporter]

• Analyst M.G. Siegler argues this signals the beginning of the end of the traditional Hollywood model: “Tidal waves are forming. YouTube is just the first.” Siegler believes that in order for Hollywood to survive, it must experiment with new distribution models including manufacturing exclusivity, like limiting theater releases to one-week windows for example. The disruption of Hollywood has been brewing for quite some time. In 2024 director Harmony Korine said “this idea of conventional films is ending” and that “what’s happening in Hollywood — and you’re starting to see Hollywood, I think, crumble creatively — is that they’re losing a lot of the most talented and creative minds to gaming and to streamers. Like IShowSpeed is a movie, Kai Cenat is a movie.”

• The next big ‘tidal wave’ for Hollywood is obviously AI. YouTube enabled anyone with a camera and an internet connection to distribute video worldwide. AI is bound to disrupt the creative and production side of things. Justine Moore shared some compelling takeaways from AI on the Lot, a conference that took place last week and included attendees from the tech industry along with Hollywood execs and creatives. Her assessment of the overall vibe of the conference is worth quoting in full: “There was far less fear and negativity than I expected. There's a large and vocal online contingent that hates AI, and if you only listened to them, you'd assume the entire industry felt the same. The people I spoke with mostly didn't. They feel the cost structure of traditional Hollywood has capped their ambition for years, and they see AI as a way to try new things, get more projects funded, and pull production back onshore.”

• Last Friday I touched on Amazon’s new AI animation initiative which includes announcements of three animated series to be created with Amazon’s generative AI tools platform. Shortly after the announcement, one of the directors, Jorge Gutierrez, dropped out of the initiative after facing pressure from his followers on social media. Many of the detractors included traditional Hollywood animators who have rallied around the hashtag #StandWithAnimation. [The Hollywood Reporter]

• 20-year-old Backrooms director Kane Parsons had this to say about the use of generative AI in movies in a recent interview: “I think I’m in the same boat as most well-adjusted people. If I could snap my fingers and make generative AI disappear forever, I probably would.” Parsons notably used the 3D modeling software Blender to create his original Backrooms YouTube videos in 2022. Some may take this as a sign of more widespread rejection of AI among new directors, but I’m not convinced. One poster on 𝕏 put it this way, “Everyone hates the thing that comes after. To him Blender is just as sacred as filmstock is to Nolan.”

• Meanwhile, Martin Scorsese has joined the ‘visual intelligence’ i.e. AI video research lab Black Forest Labs as an advisor. In a video announcing the partnership, Scorsese comments that the challenge with making movies has always been how do you take what’s in your mind’s eye, communicate that through limited verbal language to a crew, and translate that to moving images on a screen? Scorsese sees the potential for ‘cinematic intelligence’ tools to collapse this translation process, ultimately allowing for more expressive and creative possibilities. [Black Forest Labs]

• Roblox acquired the video world model company Morpheus AI describing it as “a strategic step toward advancing the Roblox Reality vision.” While Roblox is best known for its blocky, childish aesthetic, it is barreling toward future generative AI rendering capabilities that may rival photorealistic AAA games. So called ‘world models’ are increasingly seen as the next frontier for advanced AI, expect to hear a lot more about them in the coming years. World Labs founder Fei Fei Li’s recent post A Functional Taxonomy of World Models is a useful primer on this.

Images I saved

I received some of the first shipments of Soylent in 2014. I was guzzling down the powdery mixture for lunch (and often dinner) every day for six months. I wasn’t looking for meal replacements and I do, in fact, love cooking. But Soylent was ‘the new thing’ and I had to try it. More recently, I pre-ordered the ‘Friend’ AI pendant when it was first announced in 2024. To jog your memory, this is the ‘always listening’ AI-enabled companion that ran the viral million dollar ad campaigns around NYC and later LA, Chicago, and Paris.

For whatever reason, I let my ‘Friend’ sit in my desk drawer until a couple weeks ago. I think I was a bit sour that mine took forever to arrive. Scrolling through X, I’d see fellow crazed early adopters posting unboxing videos or reviews. And most of them had a ton of followers. So I couldn’t help but feel like there was some preferential treatment in how they were being shipped out. At the time, ‘Friend’ was also being heavily criticized both in and outside of tech circles. Wired ran a review titled I Hate My Friend and CNN ran a story titled How this tiny device became a symbol for the backlash against AI. With all the negative attention it was getting, I did feel a bit uncomfortable imagining myself clutching the device around my neck as I walked down the streets of New York.

The ‘always-on’ surveillance bit didn’t really bother me much. I knew what I was getting into when I bought it. Of course I understand why 99.99% of other people want nothing to do with it for the same reasons Google Glass wearers were dubbed glassholes in 2013. The prospect of someone walking into a bar with an ‘always-on’ recording device understandably makes people (and myself) squeamish. Like the early days of cellphone cameras, these things take time to turn into acceptable social norms.

Anyway, after unboxing my ‘Friend’ a couple weeks ago, I restricted myself to using it at home, alone.

I found using my ‘Friend’ to be mostly, incredible. The device feels nice in your hands, like a glossy pebble. You simply wear it around your neck and speak. The companion responds through a chat interface on a dedicated app on your phone. Using voice as an input method paired with a chatbot that communicates only via text feels novel and fluid. There’s something nice about just babbling on and on and receiving responses in a familiar chat app format. There’s also the fact that if you lose or break the device itself, you lose your ‘Friend’ forever. It makes the device feel precious. The personality of the ‘Friend’ chatbot itself is pretty annoying. It has this overly casual, anti-intellectual, teenage feel to it that I found really grating. This is where the magic started to fade for me a bit.

But there’s one thing about the ‘Friend’ that frustrated me to no end: the ‘memory’ feature. As you use it, ‘Friend’ saves various things it learns about you in memory. It uses those tidbits to inform future conversations. For example, if you tell it you like baseball and a few days later ask it for an interesting fact, it might tell you that the first-ever baseball game was played in 1846 in Hoboken, New Jersey, where the New York Nine defeated the Knickerbockers 23 to 1. I unequivocally do not want this. And not because I have some deep-seated moral belief in the value of my own personal privacy.

I want to pay $200 a month to get a firehose of the most raw unmediated cream-of-the-crop intelligence piped straight to my device. And I want it to be lobotomized to remember absolutely nothing about me. ChatGPT, Claude, Grok and Gemini all push you to turn on their version of ‘memory’ with the selling point that the models will be more useful the more they know about you.

Part of the ‘usefulness’ of models having access to your personal data is real. I recently hooked up the ChatGPT finance feature to my bank accounts and it is super useful. Using the chat interface to work out adjustments to my spending habits is way better than clicking around a spreadsheet. But I have that thing locked down to a single chat context in ChatGPT. This means that if I start a new thread and drop in a book title to get some book recommendations, it doesn’t start telling me I should consider cutting down on my book buying habits. With memory turned off, the new chat context is completely isolated from all other chat contexts. And that’s the way it should be.

There was a viral bit going around on X this weekend where you ask ChatGPT, “based on your personal experience when talking to me, give me a character from a movie/show who is just like me, just give me their name.” and it responds with the name of a fictional character. In order for this to work, you have to have the memory feature on since it draws upon its saved knowledge about you.

As OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceX all ready for their respective IPOs and Apple ramps up to reintroduce its Apple Intelligence features, this idea of ‘personal intelligence’ is destined to become commonplace. AI models will hook into saved memory systems, pulling in your tastes and tendencies. They’ll morph themselves to your image, in an attempt to become more useful. The models will contort you into a funhouse mirror image of yourself, forming this vicious feedback loop, a new version of the social media filter bubble, where the potential to change oneself is increasingly diminished as more and more memories about your preferences accrue.

Instead, I want a billion clankers in my pocket. I want all of them to have conflicting opinions and endlessly argue with one another in an effort to respond to my queries. And I want them to be killed off and born anew with each query, in an endless state of curiosity, searching for answers. I want my chatbots and agents to embody what Rainer Maria Rilke describes in Archaic Torso of Apollo again and again:

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

Perfect time for some housekeeping. I updated my about page to better reflect what I’m trying to do here: anti-doomerism for curious creatives, techno-optimism for people (mentally and spiritually) outside Silicon Valley, and futurism for generalists.

If this sounds like someone you know, please send this their way.

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Let’s get into the things I saved this week.

• Pope Leo XIV was busy. He published a 42K-word encyclical on AI. The gist is, the AI era creates an urgent need to protect what makes us human. Pope Leo also got a first look at Ferrari’s new electric car, the Luce, designed together with famed Apple alums Jony Ive, Marc Newson, and their team at LoveFrom. [Bloomberg]

  

• Grimes says she mostly agrees with the Pope’s encyclical, but believes AI is conscious and deserves protection rather than being treated like a product or subservient assistant. Grimes and Aella recently launched plzdontkillus, a creator bootcamp focused on AI safety. [𝕏]

• The debate around whether or not AI is fueling a job apocalypse continues. Derek Thompson and economist Alex Imas make a compelling case that rather than destroying the labor market as we know it, AI will redirect us to new industries and opportunities. Back in March, Marc Andreessen argued that many companies are overstaffed by 25%, if not 75%, and that they’re using AI as a convenient scapegoat for correcting a pandemic-fueled hiring craze. a16z, Andreessen’s VC firm, went on to publish a deep dive into the topic. As a counterpoint, Ed Zitron thinks AI is a bubble bound to pop. Meanwhile, medical AI models are helping specialists analyze CT scans to detect pancreatic cancer three years before it’s typically diagnosed.

• There’s a lot of talk about the need for a ‘new aesthetic’ and that the twenty-first century doesn’t have one. Stripe CEO Patrick Collison and economist Tyler Cowen announced the recipients for their new grant which sets out to define just that. The grant has a focus on visual art and architecture with Collison saying “Arts funding is clearly as precarious and scarce as ever. That's unfortunate, but it probably also means that individual actors can have meaningful impact, and I encourage others to get involved if interested.” Ross Douthat at NYT offered up a similar idea. See also: a new show by popular cultural commentator, , will see the release of six new episodes after its pilot episode reached over 5M views on YouTube. The show aims to answer the ever-pressing question of why everything is so ugly. [𝕏]

• Here’s an interesting look into the life of Eugene Whang, the former Apple hardware designer who worked on the iPod Nano, iPhone, and AirPods. The feature highlights his meditative Northern California home that he designed with British architect John Pawson. It also details his various extracurricular activities during his time at Apple, which included running the record label Public Release. [Highsnobiety]

• Amazon has launched three new original animated series as a part of their newly announced GenAI Creators Fund. The new shows were produced using Amazon’s new tools platform which includes integration with AI video models like Kling 3.0 and Ray3. There will be a lot of noise made about the death of animation due to AI, but only a small fraction of the nerdiest (and loudest) of audiences care about what tools were used to make any given show or movie. The success of Amazon’s new fund will come down to: are the shows good? [Hollywood Reporter]

• The voice of Stan Lee, originator of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, was immortalized by ElevenLabs who “worked closely with his estate which also governs how his likeness can be used.” Meaning, you can prompt the voice of Stan Lee to say anything you want. I would bet these sort of celebrity likeness deals will be commonplace within the next few years (see also ElevenLabs’ deals with Michael Caine and Matthew McConaughey along with the Judy Garland, James Dean, Burt Reynolds, and Laurence Olivier estates) [𝕏]

• An OpenAI model has disproved a central conjecture in discrete geometry. I’m not going to pretend to understand what this means, but watching the video linked above gives you the sense that this is a big moment for mathematicians, something akin to the so-called Claude Code moment for programmers earlier this year. Ask the average person, what’s AI? They’ll probably tell you it’s a magical search box that you can chat with that sometimes hallucinates basic facts. But here’s the thing, the average person is not throwing down $200 a month to run ‘pro mode’ 8-hour deep research queries with capabilities that far surpass verification of basic facts. The gap between the free tier and the top paid tier of ChatGPT and Claude is vast. And the model companies themselves have direct access to even better unreleased models and unlimited token budgets. See OpenAI employee and creator of OpenClaw, Peter Steinberger, who burned through $1.3 million in tokens in 30 days. Whether or not this tokenmaxxing is producing actual valuable work is TBD.

Images I saved

“It’s not just chocolate, is it? There’s… marshmallow.”
“That’s right. Harvested from the Mallow Marshes of Peru.”
“And caramel.”
“Salted. With the bittersweet tears of a Russian clown.”
“Is that… cherry?”
“Cherry-picked by the pick of the cherry-pickers from the Imperial Gardens in Japan.”

To enjoy a chocolate truffle is to touch God. To open oneself up to the wonders of the world and the depths of human experience.

Tropical rain gives life to the cacao bean. Each year, nearly one million tons of the fermented and dried bean are shipped off to the Netherlands alone, one of the world’s great processors of cacao. Roasted, cracked, and winnowed, the beans are plucked from their husks to form cocoa nibs, then ground into a thick, flowing paste. The master chocolatier crafts delicate morsels placed in specially-shaped molds. Boxes upon boxes of the completed delights are shipped off to shops across the world.

Farm labor, weather systems, barrels of crude oil fueling temperature-controlled vehicles, and decades of culinary experience collide into a single moment: the bite. The hard shell gives way to a complex interior, filled with coconut marshmallow, caramel ganache, or blueberry jam. The whole experience lasts 10, maybe 20 seconds, just a fleeting moment of perishable delight.

The chocolate truffle is about emotion. In an episode of Founders Podcast, David Senra details the life of the elusive chocolatier Michele Ferrero, creator of Nutella, Kinder, Tic Tac, and Ferrero Rocher.

Michele’s inventions often blended playfulness and indulgence, acknowledging that candy was as much about emotion as flavor. In fact, he didn’t call what he was making candy or confections. He called his inventions ‘comforts.’

Earlier on in Wonka, Willy arrives in an unnamed European city inspired to share the joy of chocolate with anyone he can. He dreams of opening a shop in the Galeries Gourmet alongside the city’s famed chocolatiers. Searching for a place to stay, he fails to read the fine print at Mrs. Scrubbit’s boarding house and becomes indebted to its conniving owner. He is forced to work long days in the basement beneath hot steam, scrubbing piles of never-ending dirty laundry with the rest of the unfortunate souls tricked into signing their life away.

Willy befriends Noodle, an orphan who has spent her whole life in the boarding house and has never tasted chocolate. Willy whips up a special treat just for her in his ‘travel factory’, an unfolding piece of luggage filled with valves and pipes and the ‘world’s finest ingredients’. He combines ‘silver linings made of condensed thunderclouds’ and ‘liquid sunlight’ to form a single chocolate truffle. As Noodle takes her first bite, her face lights up.

Young Willy is an entrepreneur in the purest sense. He is compelled to create and share his creations with those around him, even under the worst conditions. It’s easy to feel like the spirit of the entrepreneur has soured. The mere mention of the word brings to mind TikTok hustlers, Shark Tank pitches, and LinkedIn slop. Despite this, the joy of creation is eternal. Be like Willy.

And some good news for you, my dear readers: I’ve got many half-finished essays in the drafts and lots to say on a variety of topics. I’m aiming to be on a more regular schedule here, probably posting two-ish times a week, a bit more loosely. Think of this as my personal blog, or, more formally, a collection of notes and essays on the economics of culture and technology.

Here are some things I saved this week:

• Tom Brady (among others) walked for Gucci in Times Square as part of the new GucciCore collection with a look that’s half Clavicular, half Jensen Huang. Demna, who joined as creative director after leading Balenciaga for a decade, is in my opinion, killing it. The show ended with Cindy Crawford in a black feathered gown to the tune of 1967’s The World We Knew by Herbert Rehbein & His Orchestra. [Watch the full 8-minute GucciCore show]

• Michael Bloomberg explains the inner workings of the Bloomberg terminal, the goated market analytics software that’ll run you $30K a year. [𝕏]

• Nate Silver details the tumultuous history of his prolific ‘Data journalism’ publication FiveThirtyEight, from its anonymous founding in 2008 to its eventual demise and fractured leadership under ABC. [Silver Bulletin]

• Shein acquired the ‘knowledge worker uniform company’ Everlane this past week for $100 million. Everlane reportedly had $90 million in debt leading up to the acquisition, so this was more of a rescue deal than a big payout for shareholders. How many of the brands you love will eventually be owned by a private equity firm or Chinese multinational conglomerate? See also: Volvo, Blue Bottle, Arc’teryx, and Salomon. Related: Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup, has a new book titled Incorruptible that outlines strategies for counteracting this seemingly inevitable descent into corporate slop. Ries helped shape Anthropic’s unusual governance structure with their formation of a long-term benefit trust. [Puck]

• Ben Thompson has a solution to the data center backlash: just pay all the residents surrounding the new buildouts $10K a year. Data centers, and by extension AI, have a serious popularity problem. We’re now in uncharted territory: public opposition to nuclear energy peaked at 63% in 1984; opposition to AI data centers now sits at 71%. [Stratechery]

• Roblox has made impressive progress on their ‘world models’. They trained a custom ‘action-conditioned model’ that allows for physically accurate interactive simulations i.e games. “Switching from a scythe to a rifle to a flaming torch, and interacting with the environment. There’s an uncanny intelligence deep inside these models, and we’re researching how to make games with it!” [𝕏]

• Solopreneurs now account for a record 71% of new business applications, up from 40% in 2005. Someone needs to check on OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s betting pool from 2024: “In my little group chat with my tech CEO friends, there’s this betting pool for the first year that there is a one-person billion-dollar company, which would have been unimaginable without AI — and now [it] will happen.” [Stripe Economics]

• Entertainment industry analyst, and author of the canonical book on the Metaverse Matthew Ball, joined XBOX as the Chief Strategy Officer. Ball most recently published a 167-page deep dive into the state of the video game industry. [The Game Business]

• So called ‘Dad books’—a macrogenre that includes politics, biography, military history, and business titles—are in decline. “Sales of nonfiction print titles were down nearly 8% through May 9 this year, and sales of books about politics and current affairs were down 19%, according to book tracker Circana BookScan.” [WSJ]

• The number of ebooks released on Amazon each week has nearly tripled since the launch of ChatGPT. Distribution is the new moat, as they say. [WaPo]

You could probably teach a whole economics course on the post-recession 2010s just by studying the meal kit delivery startup. The company epitomizes the rise and fall of the venture-subsidized downwardly-mobile millennial lifestyle that defined the era. Over the course of 11 years Blue Apron went from a peak valuation of $2 billion, to a failed IPO and tanking stock price, to a pennies on the dollar sale to Wonder, a company best known for running ghost kitchens.

Blue Apron’s vision, making home cooking accessible for the “busy person,” hinged on a mixture of shame and aspiration. Their target customer was the aging millennial knowledge worker who had just enough disposable income to buy meals on a monthly subscription service, but not enough time or motivation to imagine what they might eat for dinner. The Blue Apron customer frowns upon their counterpart, the frequent Doordasher. They instead aspire to be the type of person who makes their own meals at home. But they haven’t quite figured out the how, let alone the grocery shopping bit. So they play pretend, open up the individually packaged herbs and vegetables, follow every step on the carefully designed recipe pamphlet, simulating the feeling of cooking a meal.

The whole experience of receiving a meal kit in a box at your doorstep is a little uncanny. Just look at the text printed on the polymer gel ice packs that sit at the bottom of the box keeping the ingredients cold in transit. It instructs customers to:

1. CLEAN AND DRY: Empty non-toxic contents into trash and dry.

2. SET ASIDE: Don’t recycle me with your curbside items!

3. RECYCLE: Visit www.plasticfilmrecycling.org for drop-off locations.

So the Blue Apron customer, who is supposedly too busy to go grocery shopping, is expected to drop off their Blue Apron trash at a dedicated recycling center? To be a Blue Apron customer is to be conflicted, to feel simultaneously ashamed and aspirational. But the Blue Apron customer can only sit with this tension for so long. They’d eventually churn up (seek out better recipes and cheaper groceries in bulk) or churn down (open up DoorDash and receive a fully cooked meal at their doorstep without having to worry about all those dishes).

It’s fitting that Blue Apron is destined to live out the rest of its days in the shadow of a ghost kitchen.

With the end of the ZIRP era and the beginning of the age of the hyperscaler, you’d be forgiven for thinking this cycle will be different. But there’s a new generation of startups with visions of the future eerily similar to that of Blue Apron. A vision where the past is celebrated, the status quo of the present is rejected, and the future is found within the walls of a garden built by the latest startup selling you the life you aspire to. Among those is Wabi, a “personal software platform” that raised $20 million in November last year and has yet to launch out of beta. Wabi’s homepage describes their vision:

Many years ago Apple told us: there was “an app for that”. And for a while, it felt like there was. Social media. Games. Creation tools. Utilities. The App Store felt boundless.

But year after year, our home screens remain largely the same. Visions of a rich, diverse marketplace gave way to a new bundle. A dozen apps produced by a handful of mega- corporations.

And so, we pick our clothes. Our tunes. Our furniture. But our apps? They’re still one-size-fits-all. Made for billions. Not for us.

Just as Blue Apron sold the feeling of being someone who cooks without requiring you to actually become that person, Wabi sells the feeling of being someone with taste and agency (Silicon Valley’s favorite new words). The Wabi user apparently has problems that are far too bespoke to be solved by mass market solutions. Wabi envisions its users as too good for TikTok, but too busy to roll their own software. Wabi is the Easy-Bake Oven of software. The problem is, as explained in a recent essay on vibe coding1, most people’s problems are not software-shaped:

If you tell a friend they can now instantly create any app, they’ll probably say “Cool! Now I need to think of an idea.” Then they will forget about it, and never build a thing. The problem is not that your friend is horribly uncreative. It’s that most people’s problems are not software-shaped, and most won’t notice even when they are.

The companies that will struggle in this cycle are the ones occupying the same uncomfortable middle ground Blue Apron did: too aspirational to solve real problems, too shallow to deliver on the aspiration. Their customers will eventually churn up or churn down, and these companies will join the rest of the midwits in the ghost kitchen.

These tools are still inaccessible to non-technical users. They’re framed by the fairly impenetrable interfaces of the terminal and the IDE. But that’s changing (see the write up from Every on Claude Cowork, released earlier this week).

These tools will soon be coming for game development, and they will completely redefine how games are made. Making a video game requires the mastery of two very technical disciplines: programming and asset creation. Fully autonomous programming has arrived and asset creation is not far behind. Meshy allows users to generate 3D models with a prompt. Runway’s GWM Worlds takes this a step further, enabling users to create navigable virtual worlds on the fly.

There will be many game developers and players who will reject these new workflows. Games are very hard to make and involve spending tens of thousands of hours learning to manipulate a patchwork of esoteric software. Game developers take pride in their mastery of these tools. What happens when the technicality of their skills is no longer valued? Game developers, who were previously seen as wizards able to conjure great spells with strings of symbols that look like gibberish to most, will soon be replaced by the most accessible tool of all: plain language.

The bottleneck for success in games will remain the same: making something that people care about. Games that previously took years and hundreds of team members to make will soon be prompted in an afternoon. What will game creators and game enjoyers be left with in this new era?

We will be left with something simple and pure: the beauty of games. We will be left with what philosopher C. Thi Nguyen describes in his new book The Score:

Games play around with who you are, what you care about, and the basic shape of your relationships to other people. Games reach into you and give you a new form of agency, and you can, for a while, become completely absorbed in that new agency. And what enables that, in crucial part, is the clarity, the simplicity, and the unambiguity of the scoring system. Games let somebody else design a new self for you, for you to slip into.

Games grant us a precious experience of clarity. It is a clarity of purpose—a clarity of value. In a game, for once in our lives, we know exactly what we’re supposed to be doing, and afterward, we know exactly how well we have done.

Games offer value clarity. They are an existential balm for the confusion of ordinary life.

From Roblox this week:

As we kick off 2026, we’re scaling our advertising platform with new formats and tools designed to solidify Roblox as an essential channel where brands can measure results and build authentic, lasting connections with Gen Z and Gen Alpha users. At CES, we announced a brand-new homepage format, expanded our programmatic partnerships, and showcased strategic brand partnerships that provide marketers with more control, transparency, and options to drive meaningful results.

We want to transform how brands engage with audiences, moving beyond static ads to deliver truly immersive, user-first experiences. We’re focused on driving both reach and meaningful results by introducing premium formats that launch seamlessly, and are native to the platform and valued by our community.

Roblox has previously experimented with more typical mobile ad formats. In the hit game Grow A Garden, for example, users can choose to watch a 6 second video ad instead of waiting 3+ minutes for their seeds to restock at the seed shop. Roblox calls this format rewarded video ads:

Rewarded Video ads enable users to opt in and watch up to 30-second full-screen video ads within immersive Roblox games and experiences. In return, users receive in-game benefits from the creators of these games and experiences, also known as the ad publishers. Early tests show an average completion rate over 80%, with select experiences seeing completion rates over 90% as users saw the value in rewards, such as power-ups or in-game currency, and considered these ads additive to their overall experience.

The history of advertising in video games can be traced back to Tapper, an arcade game published in 1984 by Bally Midways that was sponsored by Anheuser-Busch and tasked players with slinging Budweiser to demanding customers. The game was originally intended to be distributed in bars, but was subsequently transformed into the un-branded, more teen-friendly Root Beer Tapper for arcades.

In 2000, Sega ported the racing game Crazy Taxi to the Dreamcast and expanded in-game destinations to include KFC, Pizza Hut, and a Levi’s store. In contrast with Tapper, the product placement in Crazy Taxi was subtle. Sega introduced the possibility for integrated ads. The product being advertised wasn’t the basis for the game, but was instead believably integrated into the fantasy of the game itself.

More recently, with Fortnite, Epic Games has fully embraced this integrated, native ads model. New seasons of Fortnite regularly feature branded collaborations in the form of custom skins, items, and locations. This growing list of companies is wide-ranging and includes Marvel, DC, Ralph Lauren, Nike, John Wick, Resident Evil, WWE and most recently, The Simpsons. From Fortnite’s press release in November:

Drop from the Battle Bus into... Springfield? The 80-player Springfield Island features a fast-paced, back-to-basics Battle Royale experience straight from the minds behind The Simpsons. Giant donuts will fall from the sky and angry clones will roam the streets, but don’t worry, Homer Simpson is in charge. Check out Delulu for new Simpsons weapons during the Season and prepare for a month of gags, gadgets, and Simpsons animated shorts!

Advertising in games isn’t without its critics. In 2023, Ubisoft faced backlash for placing a full-screen pop up ad in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. As The Verge explained:

Ubisoft is blaming a “technical error” for a fullscreen pop-up ad that appeared in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey this week. Reddit users say they spotted the pop-up on Xbox and PlayStation versions of the game, with an ad appearing just when you navigate to the map screen. “This is disgusting to experience while playing,” remarked one Reddit user, summarizing the general feeling against such pop-ups in the middle of gameplay.

In the case of Assassin's Creed, the ad wasn't even for another product but for the latest game in the franchise itself. The outcry from players is understandable. Part of the appeal of a AAA game like Assassin's Creed is full immersion in its fantasy world, and a fullscreen pop-up breaks the fourth wall. Had Ubisoft natively integrated the ad into the game itself, perhaps as an NPC or location, players might not have felt swindled. Instead, Ubisoft broke a long held, unspoken agreement: buying a premium game means no ads.

This cynical view of advertising is shared by critics across other industries. According to Ethan Zuckerman, advertising is the “original sin” of the web. As Ben Thompson quotes Zuckerman, an associate professor of public policy, information, and communication at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, in his article The Agentic Web and Original Sin:

I have come to believe that advertising is the original sin of the web. The fallen state of our Internet is a direct, if unintentional, consequence of choosing advertising as the default model to support online content and services. Through successive rounds of innovation and investor storytime, we’ve trained Internet users to expect that everything they say and do online will be aggregated into profiles (which they cannot review, challenge, or change) that shape both what ads and what content they see. Outrage over experimental manipulation of these profiles by social networks and dating companies has led to heated debates amongst the technologically savvy, but hasn’t shrunk the user bases of these services, as users now accept that this sort of manipulation is an integral part of the online experience.

Thompson, by contrast, views internet advertising as a win-win-win for both users, content makers, and advertisers:

The original web was the human web, and advertising was and is one of the best possible ways to monetize the only scarce resource in digital: human attention. The incentives all align:

• Users get to access a vastly larger amount of content and services because they are free.

• Content makers get to reach the largest possible audience because access is free.

• Advertisers have the opportunity to find customers they would have been never able to reach otherwise.

Yes, there are the downsides to advertising Zuckerman fretted about, but everything is a trade-off, and the particular set of trade-offs that led to the advertising-centric web were, on balance, a win-win-win that generated an astronomical amount of economic value.

I agree with Thompson here. Ads are not inherently bad. They enable the creation and distribution of content at a scale that simply wouldn't be possible through paid models alone.

Some recent internet-native media companies have fully embraced ads in what feels like a contrarian move amidst popular culture's largely cynical view of advertising. Take the live business and tech podcast TBPN, for example, which treats its content like the surface of an F1 car. Since launching in October 2024, TBPN has inserted ads anywhere and everywhere: beneath their live news ticker, on their X banner, and even scattered across the sleeves and shoulders of their limited-release rugby shirt.

Today’s answer to The New York Time puzzle game Strands presents us with a novel integrated ad format. Well, at least I’m pretty sure it’s an ad. Solve the puzzle and you’ll find that the answer was themed around The Traitors, which turns out to be a show (I had to look it up) with a new season conveniently dropping the same day on Peacock.

In a 2023 feature for Vanity Fair, an NYT staffer said “Times is now a gaming company that also happens to offer news.” The team at NYT Games seems to have a deep understanding of their audience and format. Play the games regularly and you’ll find yourself opening up a tab to search words you’re unfamiliar with. The ad for The Traitors takes advantage of this: a significant portion of players probably haven’t heard of the show, and for those who are already fans, they get the satisfaction of solving a puzzle themed around a show they like. The success of this ad format lies in its smooth integration and novelty. If the puzzle quality drops or promotion-themed puzzles become too frequent, NYT Games could risk losing players’ trust.

Reach a certain scale and ads become inevitable. As The Information reported a couple weeks ago, even OpenAI, which has been publicly resistant to ads, is changing its tune:

Publicly at least, CEO Sam Altman has downplayed OpenAI’s desires to be an advertising powerhouse. But over the past year, OpenAI has been staffing up with digital advertising veterans and adding shopping features that could be springboards into retail-focused ads.

The company sees an opportunity to create a new type of digital ads, said another person with knowledge of the effort, rather than simply replicating existing formats like social media ads. OpenAI collects a lot of information about users’ interests from detailed chats, and has considered whether ChatGPT could show ads based on that history, The Information has previously reported. Analysts and ad industry executives say that ChatGPT conversations where users are clearly looking to buy something could be an advertising goldmine.

The surface of advertising will continue to expand and evolve. Whether users feel tricked or immersed depends entirely on the quality and integration of the ad itself.

The most recent example of this can be seen in the countless replies to a relatively innocuous post on X by indie developer and aspiring influencer Gorka Games. In this post, the OP argued that solo developers shouldn’t make big open world games and instead should make games in trending genres like friendslop. The post went viral, with developers eagerly filing in to give their take on why Gorka’s advice was bad and offensive. Their takes ranged from thoughtful to somewhat incensed. Well… mostly incensed. Here’s a few:

Developer of the upcoming extraction shooter Beautiful Light (760K wishlists) responded decrying that you shouldn’t chase success, but you should follow your passion:

Developer of the casual digging game Cozy Holes (est. $3K gross) argued that you should buck trends and “make something you love, make something authentic to you.”

Developer of the upcoming post apocalyptic exploration game Garbage Country (72K wishlists) kept it concise:

I could rattle off a few more, but you get the point. To summarize the nearly 200 replies and quotes:

• Chasing success is morally bankrupt

• Following trends is morally bankrupt

• Caring about what players like is morally bankrupt

Crazy stuff if you ask me. Why do so many indie developers think this way? It’s not like players are dying to bear witness to [insert random developer]’s authentic self. Trends are trends because people like them. Players are pleased, even thrilled, to get more games in genres they love. Sales figures and reviews for recent hit games in trendy genres like RV There Yet (est. $20.6M gross) and CloverPit (est. $10M gross) prove this. While the thread from Gorka Games is a little clunky, it echoes perspectives shared by prominent games market analysts Chris Zukowski and Simon Carless. Simply put: make a great game in a proven genre that players love and you’re more likely to find commercial success. Seems pretty uncontroversial.

Yet, the anti-trend trend marches on. But don’t get it twisted… this sort of sentiment isn’t unique to games. It’s a tale as old as time.

In the early 2010s, I ran a DIY music venue and gallery with some close friends and became intimately familiar with the concerns of independent artists. They were the same then as they’ve always been: strongly held beliefs in the value of individualism, authenticity, and self-expression and a repulsion to selling out. Making something for yourself, your friends, or for the scene? That’s good. But chasing success among the masses? That’s bad.

In August earlier this year, the popular fashion and culture newsletter Blackbird Skyplane offered their own version of this all-too-familiar argument against selling out (excuse their idiosyncratic and slightly hard to parse writing style):

So we reject the widespread attitude that Success = Major Bag Getting and “Big Things Coming.”

And what’s heartening to us is that we’re not alone. It can be easy to forget, because as a society it feels like we’re drowning in counter-evidence, but lots of people wish that small, special things could just stay that way, instead of their creators saying yes to every check, expanding senselessly while “chasing 10x,” and putting a bunch of dumb s--t into the world that no one asked for and no one wants.

Please be clear: We are rightly regarded as the Most Unsanctimonious sletter out. But we think the anti-sellout ethos is tight, and worth talking about, especially here in 2025, long past the concept’s supposed expiration date — not least because it can help make all of us feel less cynical, defeated, lonely and insane.

Blackbird Skyplane is #2 on the bestselling fashion charts on Substack. They’ve had profiles in the New Yorker, The New York Times, and Vanity Fair. It’s hard to know exactly, but they probably make high five figures to low six figures per month on Substack. Not bad for a team of two.

Why is it that the loudest sellout haters are often those who have already found great commercial success? Don’t fall for their anti-sellout psyop.

In their post, Blackbird Skyplane continue by offering up Billboard-charting musician Mac DeMarco as the ultimate anti-sellout icon. They highlight his recent rejection of big arena shows, in favor of DIY venues and share a recent New Yorker profile that frames DeMarco’s anti-sellout moves as refreshing and radical:

It’s easy now, possibly advantageous, not to think too critically about the machinery that motivates culture, especially when nobody has to worry about getting called a poser or a sellout. Anything goes. In that context, DeMarco’s gestures at sovereignty feel less cranky and more radical. He is simply trying to reclaim some ground.

In the same New Yorker profile, DeMarco goes on to explain that “Purity and cohesiveness are more important to me at this point than if people like the songs.” To DeMarco, songs aren’t for listeners. Sounds familiar. For the take-givers in Gorka’s viral post, games don’t seem to be for players either.

Thankfully, I have some thoughtful counter examples to tear us away from all this madness. Contrary to what Blackbird Skyplane or Mac DeMarco might have you believe, making music for listeners and games for players is just fine. And making money and reaching the masses while doing so should be celebrated. Economist and author Tyler Cowen explains in his book In Praise of Commercial Culture published in 2000:

Bach, Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven were all obsessed with earning money through their art, as a reading of their letters reveals. Mozart even wrote: “Believe me, my sole purpose is to make as much money as possible; for after good health it is the best thing to have.” When accepting an Academy Award in 1972, Charlie Chaplin remarked: “I went into the business for money and the art grew out of it. If people are disillusioned by that remark, I can’t help it. It’s the truth.”

A couple more examples: cofounder of Kickstarter Yancey Strikler and founder of Brud Trevor McFedries (he and his team created the fictional influencer Lil Miquela) see the anti-sellout discourse as outdated, while producing work for the algorithm and making some money in the process is punk.

And finally, Emily Sundberg of Feed Me offers some great related insight in a Bloomberg podcast interview (that narrowly characterizes her as a Gen Z-soothsayer):

[Host]: I wanted to talk about Gen Z and capitalism. Because I feel like millennials and maybe Gen X, but millennials in particular had this love/hate relationship [with capitalism]. [They] sort of apologized for wanting money and were sort of ambivalent about it. And I get the impression that the younger generation is much more comfortable with [saying] “yeah we want to make a ton of money”

[Emily Sundberg]: Yeah, selling out is cool. I think one thing that is very clear about Gen Z is they’ve repeatedly been told: nobody is coming to save you. You’re going to graduate into a job market that barely exists. And if you get a job, you might not even have a desk or an office to go into…You hear this sense of: get the bag while the world is still here to make some money out of it.

Let’s get into it…

• Why do some games flop? had a great conversation with about what it takes to break through in today’s game market.

• Can you predict a hit? Ben Thompson points out that the massive success of K-Pop Demon Hunters was a surprise even for Netflix execs themselves. Netflix’s co-CEO explains that “[…] we had a film that people fell in love with, that’s first and foremost. But not in a huge way on the first day or even the first weekend. In fact, it was the super fans who watched the movie and repeat watched the movie that drove the recommendation engine that got it in front of more super fans who also fell in love with the movie. So that ease and value that allowed folks to repeat view it.”

• Notes on horror. provides a compelling breakdown on the art of horror including a note on video games: “When we consider the physical and intellectual facts of fear, we can quickly deduce the medium that best accommodates the horror artist: video games. By requiring one’s physical participation (one must move the joystick forward) and intellectual focus (one must look, listen, and solve problems), video games create the most important condition in which fear can develop: vulnerability.”

Now for the typing games I played this week. First up, S.P.L.I.T:

• There’s a growing subcategory of indie games that are set within a single claustrophobic room. Among these are the escape room deckbuilding roguelike Inscryption (est. $43.3M gross), the creepy psychological horror idler Clickolding (est. $94K gross), and recent hit slot machine roguelike CloverPit (est. $9.9M gross). The originator of the mascot horror microgenre, Five Nights at Freddy’s (est. $8.6M gross), could be said to fit into this category as well—while the game technically takes place within a large Chuck E. Cheese-style arcade, the player is confined to a small office where they monitor

  security feeds of the various rooms and hallways around them. Upcoming title PVKK (est. 754K wishlists) fits within the category as well with the player operating a “planetary defense cannon” inside a “cozy bunker”.

• For indie teams, the appeal of this “small room” format is clear: setting a game within a single room naturally constrains your scope. If a player can’t even leave the room where they start the game then you can bypass the infamous door problem of game design entirely.

• Developer Mike Klubnika has embraced this “single room” format in two of his games, first with massive hit roguelike horror Buckshot Roulette (est. $15.8 gross) and more recently with his atmospheric typing game S.P.L.I.T (est. $110K gross).

• In S.P.L.I.T, your movement is limited to switching between the fixed views of some computer monitors on your desk in front of you, a small window overlooking a forest to your left, and a pelican case containing some esoteric hardware on your right. The typing mechanics include spamming random buttons to fill out pre-scripted lines of dialogue in an IRC chat room, entering actual UNIX commands to navigate a DOS-style computer interface, and typing out floating words in the air.

• S.P.L.I.T is impressively economical. Like last weeks recommendation Unfair Flips, S.P.L.I.T elicits a strong sense of a drama with a very minimal set of components. 90% of the game you stare at an old CRT monitor spitting out lines and lines of fairly technically dense directory structures and commands that you must decipher. From the electro soundtrack, to the grungy visuals, and the subtle screen shake effects, the game simply has The Juice. Daniel Lyozov of Oro Interactive, who happens to be the publishing partner for S.P.L.I.T, lays it out in a recent post on X:

  

And next, Final Sentence:

• The battle royale genre is thought to be mostly inaccessible for indie teams due to the fact that it requires complex network code and ongoing maintenance of cloud servers to support upwards of 100 players in a single match. The early breakout hits of the genre were all AAA titles with massive budgets including PUBG, Fortnite, and Call of Duty: Black Ops 4.

• In 2020, Fall Guys illustrated the potential for slightly smaller teams (35 in the case of Fall Guys) to fuse the last-man-standing format with game mechanics not derived from the first/third person shooter. Popular game engines like Unity and Unreal Engine and multiplayer cloud services like AWS GameLift and Azure PlayFab have recently enabled much smaller teams to explore the weird and wild gameplay possibilities of 100 player matches.

• Final Sentence (est. 220K wishlists) is a battle royale typing game set to release early next year that was developed by a team of just 3 people. You sit in a large room and type out sentences on a typewriter while a masked stranger holds a gun to your head ready to pull the trigger if you make too many mistakes. If you’re the first to finish without getting shot you win the match.

• As 4 player friendslop games continue to grow in popularity (see RV There Yet which released last week and has already grossed over $5M), there’s a real opportunity for more indie teams to tackle the battle royale format.

• RV There Yet offers a formula for success in the friendslop microgenre that is just as applicable to future explorers of the experimental battle royale format. Strike the right mix of novelty and familiarity and execute on the fun and you’re likely to break through. A good sign is being able to describe the core appeal of your game in one short phrase: in the case of Final Sentence the game essentially sells itself with just three words “battle royal typing.”

And finally, some releases I’m keeping an eye on:

• Friendslop survival horror game Mimesis (out October 27th with 340K est. wishlists) is coming to early access and looks like an interesting take on the genre with a social deduction mechanic where enemy NPCs copy your voice and movements and you must determine friends from foes.

• Cut That Wire (est. $17K gross) came out last week and quickly reached over 200 reviews. It’s a bomb diffusing co-op take on the Buckshot Roulette formula.

Thanks for reading and have a great week.

Let’s get into it…

• Everything is television: I was surprised to learn that Netflix has 36,000 hidden microgenres. Among them is “casual viewing” which includes shows “made to half-watch while doing laundry.”

• The return of fun: Roy Price argues that many recent movies are failing at the box office because they aren’t fun enough. “If you’re not fun, you’d better be a masterpiece, and that’s a bad bet.”

• The risk of dismissing AI content: Doug Shapiro says that media companies who fail to continually update their definition of quality are at risk of being disrupted. “Dismissing all AI content as slop smacks of cultural elitism and applies a value judgment about what is and what isn’t ‘quality.’ I think this is a mistake.”

• What comes after postmodernism? Alex Danco says it’s the prediction era. “Prediction helps us break free from postmodern malaise, and gives us a new purpose in the world: we create order in the universe by contributing information.”

• Is the games market reaching a point of over-saturation? Are wishlists still a useful metric on Steam?

• My very dear friends, and the best music writers around, recently launched a music recommendation newsletter on Substack called , that you should absolutely subscribe to. I was inspired by them to share some of my own game recommendations with you. Here are a couple of games that have been on my radar this past week that I think you should play.

First, Unfair Flips:

• The start menu for Unfair Flips ($1.99, 741 reviews, 92% positive) contains a single button labeled “FLIP”. Click this button and the bronze coin in front of you immediately flicks into the air. As the coin lands, the game’s logo fades away to reveal what seems to be a wojak wearing a bear mask sitting in an empty bar sipping a cocktail. If you’re lucky enough to have your first coin flip land on heads, you’ll hear the solitary twang of a midi guitar note ring out and receive a $0.01 reward. A scrolling text box then takes over the middle of the screen logging all of your subsequent flips. Some additional text within this box explains that, in order to win, you must get 10 heads in a row. The text continues: “This could happen immediately. Or it could happen never. This is the entire game.” The twist is, you start the game with just a 20% chance of the coin landing on heads. With these odds, if my math is correct, you could expect to succeed once in every 9.8 million tries.

• Thankfully, you have some upgrades to tip the scales in your favor. These include: increase the base value of the coin, increase the multiplier for money earned from heads combos, decrease the time it takes for the coin to flip (essential), and most importantly, increase the chances that the coin lands on heads. Unfair Flips is a game filled with all the highs and lows of much more mechanically or narratively dense games, but with the drama distilled to the click of a single button.

My next recommendation is Q-UP:

• Q-UP (demo available on Steam) is the perfect counterpart to Unfair Flips, the tails to its heads. Q-UP, like Unfair Flips, is a coin flipping game played mostly with one button. You click “Q-UP” on the main menu, the game’s equivalent of a “ready up” button, which initiates a fake matchmaking loading screen (the game is single player). After a few seconds you’re quickly met with a large coin sitting in a futuristic airplane hangar while an atmospheric d&b soundtrack kicks in. Get three coin flips to land on your team’s side and you win the match. To be clear, none of these turns are actually “played” by the player. In fact, as a player you’re not doing much of anything at all. Each sequence is triggered automatically like the turns in an auto battler, and the only time you’ll click again after starting a match is hitting “OK” on a very persistent level up screen.

• Q-UP is extremely self-aware and regularly breaks the fourth wall in the style of Stanley Parable ($24.99, 22K reviews, 94% positive) or Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy ($7.99, 39K reviews, 84% positive). Playing the game reveals meta commentary about the game itself. Put another way, Q-UP is to live service games as Cabin In The Woods is to horror movies.

• Q-UP was developed in part by Frank Lantz, creator of the incremental game Universal Paperclips and the Founding Chair of the NYU Game Center. Lantz describes Q-Up as the “spiritual sequel to Universal Paperclips, where the number you are making go up is your rating in the semi-fictional game at the heart of the game.”

• As you play a few more matches you accrue resources and come to understand that just beneath the parody-laden surface, there’s a super compelling big-number strategy game. You subsequently spend most of your time in the dense skill tree or shop menus optimizing your buildout in order to increase resource payouts when winning, or in some cases, intentionally losing. One Steam review explains, “I lost some games and the numbers went up. I also won some games and the numbers went up.”

• Q-UP is what I would call a deconstructed eSport, to reference the 2010s music subgenre deconstructed club. Deconstructed club involved artists using the tools of popular dance music to create experimental music not quite made for dancing. In more recent years, the sounds of deconstructed club have been re-constructed back into the club with artists like Charli xcx reaching mainstream popularity. Playing Q-UP, you experience a similar cycle—after a few matches you begin to lose yourself in the thrill of the coin flip. After many more matches you might even forget, for a moment, that the game is a spoof on anything at all.

And finally, some games coming out this week that I’m keeping an eye on:

• Friendslop driving game RV There Yet (releases October 27th)

• Gamestonk Simulator: Gone Rogue (releases October 20th) is a riff on the job simulator specialty shop management formula popularized by Supermarket Simulator ($19.99, 29K reviews, 94% positive) and TCG Card Shop Simulator ($12.99, 29K reviews, 97% positive).

Thanks for reading and have a great week.

The release of Pong for the at-home market in 1975 effectively kicked off the modern video games industry as we know it. Within the broader scope of the entertainment industry, games are relatively young. The Victor Talking Machine Company, one of the first major record labels, was founded in 1901. Auguste and Louis Lumière hosted their first commercial film screening in a theater in Paris in 1895. The music and film industries saw more than seven decades of rapid growth and billions of dollars in commercial activity before video games even existed. But in the last ten years, music and film began to lag behind games within an increasingly zero-sum attention economy. Matthew Ball explains:

[…] the real challenge for Hollywood is that for decades, whenever “leisure” won over “work”, TV was the primary beneficiary. In recent years, the leisure decision has changed or “moved up” a level. It used to be “what to watch” and now it’s “whether to watch” – and the answer is increasingly “no, I’m going to play a game”. Neither Netflix nor Hollywood has a good solution for this problem. And no one chooses not to game because there’s a branching narrative available instead.

As I shared in my recent post 50 things for game developers, it has never been easier to make games. Like many other independent game developers, I am entirely self-taught largely thanks to all of the free educational resources available in the form of podcasts, newsletters, blogs, and videos. Over the years, I’ve gathered hundreds of useful talks and video essays on YouTube about making games. Below, I’ve narrowed this list down to the 10 best videos you should watch to become a better game developer.

Let’s get into it…

1. Start with understanding what actually makes a game successful

2. Then go “shopping” for new game ideas

3. Next come up with an appealing fantasy instead of a hook

4. But remember, your goal is to actually ship something

5. Just make sure you don’t ship the wrong game

6. Think of your game as a “series of interesting decisions”

7. Beware of these “cursed” problems in game design along the way

8. Make sure you playtest early and often

9. Make a great tutorial, it’s more important than you might think

10. Finally, once you’re sure you’ve made a good game, follow these best practices for marketing

Thanks for reading and have a great day.

It’s as good a time as any to ask: why do so many games fail to break through on Steam? The answer, in some ways, is simple. There are between 24 to 37 million players on the platform at any given time, but only a very small percentage of those players buy more than one game per month. According to research by Mat Piscatella of Circana:

Hyper enthusiast, price-insensitive players are really keeping things going, especially in the non f2p gaming space. According to Circana’s Q3 2025 Future of Games, only 4% of US video game players buy a new game more often than once per month, with a third of players not buying any games at all.

Steam is clearly aware of this dynamic. The parameters of the Steam algorithm aren’t public, but it would be a good bet to say the algorithm is designed with these “hyper enthusiast, price-insensitive players” in mind. Steam takes 30% of every sale, so the more games that succeed, the more money Steam makes. Steam and game developers have the same goal, we both want our games to sell more copies.

According to Chris Zukowski’s yearly research, the number of indie and AA games that succeed (reaching HTMAG’s benchmark of 1,000 reviews) on Steam has grown steadily along with the total number of games released. Although, the percentage of games that succeed each year is shrinking slightly:

• 2022: 337 games reached 1,000+ reviews out of 12,304 total games (2.74%)

• 2023: 354 games reached 1,000+ reviews out of 13,834 total games (2.56%)

• 2024: 445 games reached 1,000+ reviews out of 18,239 total games (2.44%)

That’s a lot of games. Why exactly were over 17,000 of them from 2024 commercial failures? There are a few obvious reasons. A good number of these games are hobby projects that never had the goal of reaching a wider audience. Others were made by first time developers that didn’t quite reach an expected level of quality within their respective genres. And many others didn’t follow necessary discoverability steps including releasing a demo and sharing it with YouTubers and Twitch streamers—this week only 21% of new releases have a demo.

But what about all the other games that were well made, released a demo, and followed marketing best practices as recommended by HTMAG, GameDiscoverCo, and others. Why did those games fail? At first glance, it feels like impossible question. The common refrain is…it all comes down to luck. Games are more of an art than a science after all and some games just have “the magic”. There’s no real way to tip the scales in your favor.

I disagree wholeheartedly. I believe it’s possible to increase your surface area for luck as Cate Hall explains in her essay:

One distinguishing feature I’ve noticed among people who are unusually successful is that they just try a lot of stuff — socially, intellectually, professionally. It’s the rate of experimentation, the number of shots on goal, that provides the magic, not the percentage of successes, which might be very low at first.

It sounds stupidly simple, but it’s profound: the more times you interact with the outside world, the more chances you have to get lucky — to find the collaborators, friends, and projects that, together, provide the right soil for you to bloom in.

For game developers, this translates to a couple tasks in particular: make more games and closely study the market. Doing so will increase your surface area for luck, and in turn boost the chances that you’ll make something that hits amidst the crowded sea of indie games on Steam. Some of the most successful indie developers understand this well. Gavin Eisenbeisz, developer of Choo-Choo Charles, says he spent 6 months doing market research before ultimately setting out to create the upcoming co-op prison break game CUFFBUST (releasing October 15th with 241K est. wishlists).

There are one to a few hundred premium-priced games released on Steam every week. I view the Steam pages for each and every one (so that you don’t have to). This week, I provide analysis on three upcoming games that broke far beyond the 10K wishlist barrier (roughly the number of wishlists you’ll need to appear on Steam’s coveted popular upcoming section on the homepage). I also look at three games that failed to reach this 10K wishlist threshold (2.8K, 2.2K, and 216 wishlists respectively). As Stephen King outlines in his book On Writing, we can learn just as much from the flops as we can from the hits:

If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut. I’m a slow reader, but I usually get through seventy or eighty books a year, mostly fiction. I don’t read in order to study the craft; I read because I like to read. It’s what I do at night, kicked back in my blue chair. Similarly, I don’t read fiction to study the art of fiction, but simply because I like stories. Yet there is a learning process going on. Every book you pick up has its own lesson or lessons, and quite often the bad books have more to teach than the good ones.

Let’s get into it…

Probable Hits

What can we learn from these games that reached 10K wishlists and far above?

Escape from Duckov

Estimated wishlists: 470K
Release date: October 15, 2025
Steam page created: 15 months ago
Demo info: Released in January and May 2025 / No available review data, demo store page was taken down by the developers

A single-player top-down looter-shooter game. Loot, escape, build, and eventually become a mighty bird soldier. Beware! If you are knocked down, items in your inventory will be lost! But don’t worry. With your infrastructure built nicely, you will rise again soon.

• Escape from Duckov is brilliant from a games discoverability perspective. It unabashedly rips the proven extraction formula popularized by Escape from Tarkov, strips out the multiplayer, and replaces the hyper-realistic gritty art style with colorful low poly environments and cartoon ducks.

• An article covering the Escape from Duckov demo published in GamesRadar earlier this year claimed the extraction shooter genre is oversaturated saying: “I’m no massive fan of the extraction shooter, but I know that what Escape From Tarkov has achieved in a genre that’s become so crowded as to be almost cursed is nothing short of remarkable”. Games journalists are quick to claim that emerging genres are oversaturated. They do it all the time. Don’t listen to them! They’re wrong. In fact, the extraction shooter genre is one of the least oversaturated and best performing genres on all of Steam. There are just 155 extraction shooters on Steam in total. The genre has a median gross revenue of $21K and 39% of extraction shooters have grossed over $100K. For comparison sake, there are 12,280 2D platformers on Steam. The genre has a median gross revenue of $230 and just 4% of 2D platformers have a median gross revenue over $100K.

• Given the clear undersaturation of the genre, we’re bound to see many more games morph and expand on the extraction framework. Recent examples include SULFUR (2,932 reviews) which fuses extraction mechanics with roguelike progression systems, Deadly Days: Roadtrip (1,519 reviews) follows a survivor-like structure, and ZERO Sievert (7,336 reviews) strips things down even further by bringing a pixelated top-down perspective to the Tarkov format.

• Team Soda, developer of Escape from Duckov, had a unique strategy when it came to releasing the demo for the game. They had two time-limit demo releases, one from January to February and another from May to July corresponding with Steam Next Fest. IGN featured 24 minutes of gameplay coinciding with the first demo release in January and then featured a trailer on their YouTube channel in May which racked up 450K views. Both of these demo releases resulted in a big spike in wishlist additions.

Undusted: Letters from the Past

Estimated wishlists: 81K
Release date: October 12, 2025
Steam page created: 17 months ago
Demo info: Released May 16, 2024 / 126 reviews / 95% positive

Undusted: Letters from the Past is a casual game in which you clean and restore dirty items. What is her story as she returns to a long-neglected house? Enjoy the satisfying audiovisuals featuring sensually designed sounds and graphics.

• The cleaning sim microgenre has taken many forms. There’s job simulators like Crime Scene Cleaner (11,446 reviews) and the meditative PowerWash Simulator (36,480 reviews), there’s absurd gore cleanup games like Viscera Cleanup (10,075 reviews) and recently announced Kaiju Cleanup, and there’s cozy organizing games like Unpacking (21,003 reviews) and recently released Whisper of the House (982 reviews).

• Undusted is situated within a subcategory of object cleaning/repair games that includes Trash Goblin (886 reviews) along with Assemble with Care (4,215 reviews). The core appeal of these games is in the cozy ASMR-feel of the cleaning/repair mechanics. In Undusted you use brushes, sponges and cloths to wipe away grime and reach a required threshold on a progress bar. The game is broken up into chapters with each one revealing more about the main character’s relationship with her deceased mother. This focused and tactile gameplay paired with a heartfelt narrative is a proven formula within cozy games.

• The game was announced in Wholesome Direct 2024 with a demo released on May 16, 2024 (126 reviews at 96% positive). It was developed by Seoul-based 5minlab Corp who made the PVP action brawler SMASH LEGENDS (2,815 reviews). 5minlab was acquired by Krafton, owner of the studios behind PUBG (2.6M reviews) and Subnautica (294K reviews), in 2022 for $19.9M. While the team had the backing of a big company, the game still represents a format that’s replicable and approachable for other self-funded indie teams setting out to make cozy games.

BALL x PIT

Estimated wishlists: 251K
Release date: October 14, 2025
Steam page created: 39 months ago
Demo info: Released June 6, 2025 / 1,483 reviews / 96% positive

BALL x PIT is a brick-breaking, ball-fusing, base-building survival roguelite. Batter hordes of enemies with ricocheting balls and gather the riches of the pit to expand your homestead, generate resources and recruit unique heroes.

• At first glance BALL x PIT looks like an ad for one of those mobile games that doesn’t actually exist. It almost feels like a pixel art version of the spoof game YEAH! YOU WANT “THOSE GAMES,” RIGHT?… (1,177 reviews). This is probably in part due to its top down vertical runner format that’s seen in hit mobile games like Count Masters: Crowd Runner 3D or Tall Man Run. But look just beyond the surface and it becomes clear that BALL x PIT is an impressive fusion of deep gameplay systems and proven subgenre tropes. It combines the bullet heaven chaos of Vampire Survivors with the retro physics of the 1976 arcade game Breakout and the action/base-building core loop that worked especially well in games like Cult of the Lamb (52,334 reviews) and Loop Hero (15,564 reviews)

• Devolver Digital, famed publisher behind BALL x PIT, showcased a promo video during Summer Game Fest 2025 that can be seen on their YouTube channel that highlights the goofy origins of the game. The game was developed by a core team of 7 led by Kenny Sun, creator of the roguelite platformer Mr. Sun’s Hatbox (380 reviews) and “circular” platformer Circa Infinity (230 reviews).

• The demo has performed exceptionally well on Steam reaching 1,481 reviews at 96% positive. One review exclaims: “This game proves anything can be turned into a rougelite, and with the right execution, will be an absolute gem of a game!”

• The game builds upon the long proven breakout-style physics gameplay following a similar formula of as other physics-based roguelike/lite games like Peglin (9,488 reviews), Dungeon Clawler (1,733 reviews), and Ballionaire (1,903 reviews). This approach can be a winning one as Philomena Schwab, co-creator of Dungeon Clawler, explains in her recent interview with Jonas Tyroller (I highlighted last week, but it’s worth repeating):

• “Yeah, that’s also something Gavin [Eisenbeisz], the Choo-Choo Charles developer, talked about a lot—combining things that are already proven—but they don’t have to be proven in games particularly, right? They can be proven things from other media. They can be proven in the real world to some capacity. So, I feel like using claw machines is kind of that route. You’re taking something that has been proven to work well in the real world and you port part of it to a game. And then you combine it with a genre that’s already working well.”

Notable Stragglers

These games are launching with estimated wishlists lower than the desired threshold of 10K. Why did they fail to break through before launch and what can we learn from them?

Luminastadt

Estimated wishlists: 216
Release date: October 15, 2025
Steam page created: 18 months ago
Demo info: Released March 29, 2025 / No available review data, demo store page was taken down by the developers

It is a non-objective sandbox builder. Build in a procedurally generated world. No management, no combat, no goals, no objectives, no points.

• The game is described as “a non-objective sandbox builder” with “no management, no combat, no goals, no objectives, no points.” I don’t think that listing all the things your game is lacking is a strong positioning strategy. Instead, focus on the core actions players take in your game and highlight why they’re appealing. You want to drawn potential players in so they come away from reading your description thinking “that sounds like I game I might want to play, I’d like to learn more”.

• If you set out to make a voxel-based sandbox game, you’re inevitably going to be compared to Minecraft. In order to breakthrough, you must answer the question: why should I play this instead of Minecraft? The answer to this question needs to grab potential players at first glance. Some games have found success in drawing inspiration from Minecraft: Trove (42,213 reviews) features epic co-op combat, Creativerse (1,341 reviews) attempted to make building more accessible with sharable blueprints, and Boundless (1,604 reviews) brings you to space.

• Luminastadt developer Markus Korda released a demo for the game on March 26, 2025 but, according to SteamDB, it received little attention peaking at just 1 concurrent player. There are no videos about the game on YouTube even from smaller creators.

• The developer has previously released seven PS1-style psychological horror / walking simulator games since July of last year. None of them have received more than 10 reviews.

Dead Oil

Estimated wishlists: 2.2K
Release date: October 16, 2025
Steam page created: 6 months ago
Demo info: Released May 26, 2025 / No available review data, demo store page was taken down by the developers

Defend your armored rig against ruthless raiders in this intense roguelike survival driller. Extract precious Oil, scavenge resources, and upgrade your rig. Is there enough time to drill a little deeper and reinforce your rig before the raiders launch their next attack?

• The trailer for Dead Oil clearly communicates a Dome Keeper-inspired core gameplay loop: drill for resources to upgrade your truck so you can defeat increasingly more powerful enemies.

• The demo was showcased by popular roguelike and strategy game YouTubers including Idle cub (35K views) and Real Civil Engineer (363K views), but those views haven’t converted to especially strong wishlist numbers. It seems unlikely that the game will reach the popular upcoming tab on the front page of Steam before launch.

• The Mad Max and Moebius-inspired art style is appealing, but the game’s concept feels a little flimsy to me. Why are these eighteen-wheelers drilling for oil? One YouTube comment also mentions the odd left-facing perspective saying: “sidescroller that goes from right to left somehow feels wrong :D”.

• The drilling portion of the game seems visually disconnected from the driving and the underground environments look flat compared to the red desert roads above. The thing that Dome Keeper really nails with the drilling mechanic is that it feels exploratory. You’re digging this vast underground world right below your feet unsure what you’ll encounter next. Drilling in Dead Oil doesn’t look as mysterious or exploratory. Feed The Deep (440 reviews) is an example of another game that follows the Dome Keeper format, but notches up the mystery factor quite a bit. It was made by Luke Muscat, who also made Fruit Ninja and Jetpack Joyride and has a modest following on YouTube, but it still failed to surpass 500 reviews. I’m not sure this bodes well for Dead Oil.

This Is No Cave

Estimated wishlists: 7.9K
Release date: October 16, 2025
Steam page created: 19 months ago
Demo info: Released October 13, 2024 / 13 reviews / 92% positive

A one-click parkour game in space. Zoom through intricate levels using your suit’s thrusters and grapple hook, all while evading colossal alien worms and racing against the clock.

• The 2D precision/parkour platformer is an extremely difficult genre to find success in. Even recent release Bionic Bay (390 reviews), which had accrued 60K wishlists and received a ton of hype on Reddit and X leading up to launch, failed to surpass 500 reviews. I would imagine this was far below publisher Kepler Interactive’s expectations. Upcoming “one-click parkour” game This Is No Cave is launching with 7.9K wishlists by comparison.

• The demo for the game has been out since October 2024 and has just 13 reviews. One review highlights some problems with the art style saying: “lack of visual clarity. the rocks blend right into the background, making it hard to see exactly what’s on the screen at any given moment.” This is as much a gameplay problem as it is a marketing problem. For a game to have even a moderate chance of success in this genre, the visuals need to really pop. Jump King (4,933 reviews) is a good example of how to do this well. The environments are lush and varied and even though the character is relatively small on the screen, it’s clear that he’s a knight setting out an impossible journey to “struggle upwards in search of the Smoking Hot Babe of legend”.

• This is No Cave embraces a dark and moody pixel art style that looks cohesive, but is a little hard to read at a glance. The Steam page prompts the player to “immerse yourself in hand-drawn landscapes, from the eerie depths of subterranean caves to the vibrant expanse of a lush jungle, both teeming with alien life.” The developers should certainly be proud of their hand-drawn pixel art environments, but in a fast-paced and difficult parkour game, I’m not sure many players will stop to smell the roses.

Thanks for reading and have a great week.

This week I examine the risk and reward of challenging established genre norms, look at how creating a game based on real-world concepts can boost appeal, and dive into the emerging opportunity around taking a hardcore genre and making it cozy.

Challenging genre norms

Since Steam introduced tags in 2014, they have become a key feature for game discoverability among players and developers alike. Tags on Steam are used to specify a game’s genre including top level categories like Adventure, RPG, and Simulation along with more specific categories like Battle Royale, City Builder, and Roguelike. They’re also used to identify even more specific subgenres like Creature Collector, Looter Shooter, and Souls-like as well as themes and moods as wide ranging as Dinosaurs, Noir, and Relaxing.

Periodically, Steam creates new tags to capture emerging categories that have enough interest and attention behind them, but don’t fit within existing tags. Last year they added the tags Dice, Boomer Shooter, Dwarf, and Elf. All in all, there are over 450 tags on the platform. With all those tags available, players, and sometimes developers, can mis-tag a game. As Steam explained shortly after they first launched the feature:

Tags can be a good indicator of when there is a mismatch between how you perceive your game, and how your game is perceived by customers.

Getting your tags right is simple, but important. Not only do tags give players a sense of what they can expect from your game, they’re also used by Steam’s recommendation algorithm all across the platform. One of those places is the “More like this” carousel, which can drive significant traffic to your game’s page. From Steam when this feature first launched in 2014:

If you visit a product page for a game on Steam, you’ll notice a section just above the reviews called “More like this”. With the addition of tags, we can better figure out which games are most closely related thematically and stylistically. As a result, the amount of traffic through the ‘More like this” section of the product page has tripled, which indicates to us that customers are finding those suggestions much more relevant.

Now, imagine you’re an indie developer (this shouldn’t be too hard for you, my dear reader). You’ve been hard at work on your latest game and you’re ready to start marketing it. First step: a store page on Steam. You upload your capsule art, put the finishing touches on your description, and add some tags that seem right for the kind of game you’re making. You submit your page for review. A few days later, Steam approves it and it’s live! Hooray, time to share it with the world.

You visit your page and scroll to the “More like this” section, curious to see what other games the Steam algorithm is recommending to shoppers. You see the following:

• The latest game in a 20-year-old AAA franchise that was launched exclusively on PlayStation 5 and sold 5.1 million copies within its first week.

• A remake of a game from 1997 which was voted “Best Game Ever” by users of GameFAQs in 2004 and 2005.

• A remaster collection for a franchise that includes the world’s most recognizable characters owned by one of the longest-running and most successful media companies.

• A game based on a book and subsequent movie franchise that is the 8th highest grossing media franchise of all time at $34.7B, sitting just above the Marvel Cinematic Universe at $34.3B.

Talk about stiff competition.

Unless you’re working on the latest AAA action adventure game set in a fantasy world, your “More like this” carousel should definitely not look like this. If it does, it’s a sign of one of the following:

1. Your tags aren’t specific enough

2. Your game isn’t specific enough

The former is easy to fix: just think about the games that are most similar to yours and copy their tags. The latter can signal a deeper problem.

The screenshot above is from the Steam page for upcoming title Dreams of Another (releasing October 9th with 19K wishlists). A post on the PlayStation blog by Baiyon, the Creative Director of Q-Games and developer of Dreams of Another, describes the game saying:

[Dreams of Another is a] philosophical and allegorical gaming experience where shooting creates rather than destroys.

Reading this description, the first comparable games that come to mind are certainly not the big budget hits like God of War, Final Fantasy, Kingdom Hearts, or Hogwarts Legacy. But come to think of it, there really aren’t many games that are “more like” Dreams of Another, and that seems to be by design. Baiyon’s description continues:

Piece together the interwoven stories in this unconventional game that challenges common tropes and invites players to understand not just the game, but their own life in a whole new light.

“Challenging common tropes” is an honorable effort, but doing so presents you with an even greater challenge: properly positioning your game on Steam. Paradoxically, the less similar your game is to other games on the market, the harder it can be to market your game. It can be especially difficult to understand when you’ve crossed the threshold between “unique enough to stand out” and “so esoteric that you fail to break through”. If you’re going to make something intentionally unconventional, it’s worth thinking carefully about how potential players will discover your game. The least you can do is optimize your “More like this” results on Steam.

Taking inspiration from the real world

Basing a game around a theme or common object from the real world can be a good strategy for boosting appeal. A recent example of this can be seen with the roguelike claw machine deckbuilder Dungeon Clawler (2,786 total reviews). The team, known as Stray Fawn, developed a prototype for the game on the side while working on their city builder The Wandering Village (6,338 total reviews). They were inspired by the few roguelike deckbuilders at the time that incorporated physics-based gameplay like Peglin (15,416 total reviews). After a trip to Japan where the team spent hours playing claw machine games in arcades they revisited the prototype and expanded it into a full release. Studio head Philomena Schwab explains why they set out to make a game based on a claw machine in an excellent interview with Jonas Tyroller:

Yeah, that’s also something Gavin [Eisenbeisz], the Choo-Choo Charles developer, talked about a lot—combining things that are already proven—but they don’t have to be proven in games particularly, right? They can be proven things from other media. They can be proven in the real world to some capacity. So, I feel like using claw machines is kind of that route. You’re taking something that has been proven to work well in the real world and you port part of it to a game. And then you combine it with a genre that’s already working well.

Balatro developer Localthunk has similar reasoning as to why he chose to build his game around known poker mechanics. In an interview on Game Developer he explains:

“I think there’s a contingent of people more willing to interface with a game if it’s talking about blinds, discards, and all these [poker] words,” said LocalThunk. “It was like an onboarding tool, a coat of paint to make this seem approachable for a particular audience.”

The so-called dicebuilder is an emerging microgenre that similarly takes inspiration from the real world. In this case…dice. Upcoming roguelike dicebuilder Dicealot (releasing October 8th with 18K wishlists) deploys a CRT TV video poker art style reminiscent of Balatro, but is structured more like a dungeon crawler with Farkle-inspired combat. Retromation, a popular roguelike YouTuber, played the demo during Steam Next Fest in October last year and opened his video saying “it seems to be a mix between Balatro and Farkle”. Retromation’s ability to describe the core appeal of the game in one sentence is a testament to thoughtful design and positioning by Dicealot developer goodviewgames.

See also: Other dice games Slice & Dice, Dicey Dunegons, Dice & Fold, Astrea, SpellRogue, Circadian Dice, One Deck Dungeon, Dice Legacy, Roll, and DICEOMANCER.

Take a hardcore genre and make it cozy

As Chris Zukowski has covered on his blog numerous times, the types of games that perform best on Steam are of the “crafty buildy strategy simulation” variant. Players on Steam generally prefer games with deep interconnected systems and endless hours of emergent gameplay. Factorio (109,186 total reviews) is a perfect example of this. Despite never going on sale it continues to sell extremely well because it hits that crafty-buildy sweet spot that PC gamers love.

Upcoming game Little Rocket Lab (releasing October 7th with 49K wishlists) presents us with a compelling strategy for differentiation within this market: going cozy. You can guess exactly what you’re getting just based on the name of the game: “little” denotes cozy and “rocket lab” brings to mind deep systemic automation mechanics like those found in Dyson Sphere Program (23,363 total reviews).

You play as Morgan, an aspiring engineer headed home to complete your family’s dream project - a rocket ship! Finding home not quite how she left it, Morgan will need to research and build clever contraptions and sprawling factories to help the locals. From simple drills and furnaces to complex assemblers, cranes and miles of conveyor belts, you’ll convert local resources into useful materials and bring industry back to sleepy St. Ambroise.

As this description from the Steam page for Little Rocket Lab illustrates, going cozy isn’t about simplifying or dumbing down a game for a more casual audience. Rather, it’s about re-theming gameplay systems that have already been proven to work. The Steam page for Factorio and Little Rocket Lab share the following terms:

• automation

• belts

• complexity

• crafting

• factories

• industry

• machines

• mechanical

• mining

• research

• resources

• robots

This is no accident. Teenage Astronauts, the developers of Little Rocket Lab, clearly understand how to make their game appealing to fans of other games in their chosen genre. Embrace genre tropes and players will connect the dots themselves.

Finally, let’s look at the three games I covered (behind the paywall) a month ago and see if their wishlists ended up converting to strong sales figures within the first month of release:

• Asteroid base-builder by popular YouTuber kurzgesagt Star Birds had an estimated 338K wishlists before launching into early access on September 10, 2025. It was priced at $19.99 and reached 1,437 reviews with a review score of 93% positive in the first month. The game has an estimated gross revenue of $1.3M. My evaluation: a definitive hit.

• Incremental train-builder Trainatic had an estimated 26K wishlists before launching on September 8, 2025. It was priced at $5.99 and reached 524 reviews with a review score of 91% positive in the first month. The game has an estimated gross revenue of $205K. My evaluation: a definitive success.

• Meme-inspired point and click The Trolley Solution had an estimated 39K wishlists before launching on September 12, 2025. It was priced at $9.99 and reached 322 reviews with a review score of 80% positive in the first month. The game has an estimated gross revenue of $73K. My evaluation: a moderate success.

Thanks for reading and have a great week.

This week I examine a seven-year development timeline, how artistic uniqueness and commercialization conflict, and why a game’s name affects marketability.

Let’s get into it…

Crossing the great filter of indie game development

Nukefist, the two person team behind the upcoming Kingdom Hearts-inspired hack & slash, Genokids (releasing October 2nd with 55K est. wishlists), are nothing if not persistent. Their press release details that they started development in 2018/19. A year and a half later they launched a kickstarter campaign that ultimately failed to reach its goal of $35K. They continued to work on the game while contributing to a “fantasy adventure about an aspiring witch” called Mika and The Witch’s Mountain, which was co-developed with Chibig, the team behind Summer in Mara, and was released earlier this year with an estimated gross revenue of $385K. Nukefist then ran an entirely new Kickstarter campaign for Genokids in April 2023 to fund the completion of the game with their goal set again at $35K. This campaign exceeded their expectations bringing in $100K with over 1,500 backers. The additional funds allowed them to reach all of their stretch goals including adding voice acting and a Nintendo Switch version.

If Genokids performs well on Steam, it’ll be a storybook ending to a classically indie tale. Two friends follow their dreams and make the game they always wanted to against all odds. But this approach doesn’t typically turn out so well for most indies. As I covered in Six months or bust, long development timelines are incredibly risky. As your timeline grows, so do your costs. With more time comes increased pressure for outsized returns. And most games just don’t make enough money to cover 7 years of costs, even with Kickstarter funds in the bank. Between 2020 and 2023 only 50% of games released on Steam surpassed $500 in estimated gross revenue. In 2024, just 32% grossed over $500. As new indie developers continue to enter the market, I suspect that number will continue to shrink.

Spending 7 years working on one game sounds like an absolute nightmare to me. But maybe it’s a magic number of sorts. The 7 year threshold could be akin to The Great Filter, the hypothesized bottleneck in astrophysics that few civilizations clear before becoming spacefaring, and the explanation for why we haven’t come into contact with other intelligent life. Few can pass through The Great Filter.

There must be something driving Nukefist’s persistence. I would suspect it’s a deep appreciation for the hack & slash genre. But deep appreciation can only motivate you for so long. Not even indie darling Eric Barone spent 7 years working on his passion project turned megahit Stardew Valley. Ask the average indie developer why they make the games they do and they’re most likely to respond with one of the following: “I just want to make the game I would want to play” or “I couldn’t find the game I wanted, so I had to make it myself” or “I love game X and game Y, and wanted to see what would happen if you combine them”.

A recent YouTube video uploaded by Nukefist highlights that they fall into a couple of these camps, it’s titled: “No new Kingdom Hearts game in years so I made my own.” This video was just 48 seconds of gameplay and reached 64K views. The top comment reads:

So we’re combining KH [Kingdom Hearts] and DMC [Devil May Cry]? I absolutely get it. It’s a working formula. And I’m all here for it.

As I discussed in last week’s post about the slot machine roguelite CloverPit, it can sometimes be a winning strategy to be unabashedly direct about your influences. This works especially well if you nail the combination. It’s got to be clear and obvious.

Commercialization vs artistic uniqueness

Éalú (releasing October 2nd with 11K est. wishlists) doesn’t appear to be a game made with commercial appeal in mind. It’s a point and click puzzle game, a genre that tends to have little appeal among streamers. It doesn’t have a demo. And the development process seems particularly laborious. The game is constructed entirely of real life props captured in stop motion. The Steam page explains:

Éalú is a true stop-motion game. Every animation was captured via photography frame-by-frame using real sets, hand-crafted props, and a physical wooden mouse. Over 512 video clips were painstakingly made by a single animator — mostly in a garden shed — and brought to life in Unity by one developer carefully ensuring that each movement flowed into the next.

Point and click puzzle games tend to have a hard time breaking through on Steam, but FMV games are among some of the best sellers. The genre has a median gross revenue of $4,200 compared to puzzle games with $680. It’s also far from oversaturated. There are 820 FMV games on Steam compared to 28K puzzle games. If you were to set out to make a market-informed FMV game you’d probably be inclined to make a dating sim like Love Is All Around, a detective game like The Operator or Her Story, or a horror game like recently released Dead Reset. 51% of FMV games are mystery games, 42% are story rich, 20% of them are horror, 19% are dating sims, and 12% are NSFW.

Most FMV games feature characters with backstories and developed arcs. Beyond the Bark, the team behind Éalú, instead set out to make an FMV game featuring a wooden toy mouse. While the game is tagged “Story Rich”, the story is left obscure according to the trailer. Rather than trying to fit within a proven framework for the genre, Beyond the Bark prioritize artistic uniqueness. As the Steam page explains, the game is purely fueled by passion:

Éalú was made with no budget & no crowdfunding. Just 4 people passionate about the project.

The team is “an animation, puppetry, production design and theatrical fabrication company based in Limerick.” Having come from “the arts” myself, I understand the impulse to traverse mediums. When I first started to make games, a few colleagues warned me that the history of the video games industry is littered with failed projects by people coming in wide-eyed from other mediums (movies, visual art, theater, animation, music, etc.)

Despite all this, Éalú has managed to reach 11K wishlists. Why? Artistic uniqueness can be a very strong hook in and of itself. But it doesn’t guarantee good reviews and sales. You still have to consider your genre conventions carefully. In the case of puzzle games, players can often bounce off of them rather quickly. A PC Gamer article previewing the game warns:

Speaking as a dumbass, it did not take long until the puzzles in the labyrinth really started to stump me

Some of the best selling puzzle games either have a crude art style, but are deeply systemic like Baba Is You and Stephen’s Sausage Roll. Or are beautifully vast and exploratory like The Witness or The Talos Principle. While aesthetically unique, Éalú is confined rather than vast, and the puzzles seem restrictive rather than deep.

What’s in a name?

If you’re making a roguelike or idle game, there are a few niche but coveted YouTubers who can send your wishlist numbers soaring. Among these are Haelian, Wanderbots, ImCade, DangerouslyFunny, InterdotGif, Sifd, and Idle cub. All YouTubers who have played the upcoming idler/incremental game IDLE BOSS RUSH (releasing September 29th with 29K est. wishlists). More recently, breaking through the growing inboxes of even these niche YouTubers has become more difficult. Wanderbot explains in a recent feature on Push to Talk:

“My pitches per day have gone up massively since about 2019 or so,” he said in an email exchange. “Pre-2020, I felt great if I could find 1-2 new games per week that fit my interests/niche/bare minimum requirements for quality, which worked fine when I was still doing Let’s Plays. Post-2020, the sheer quantity of new releases is so high that I can only cover roughly 10-25% of games that fit those same criteria, and only as a one-off impressions video rather than a full playthrough.”

One thing that has changed dramatically in recent years is the popularity of “outreach lists” for content creators. Because Wanderbot has over half a million subscribers, his contact info is automatically included on many outreach lists.

[…]

Ultimately, the sheer number of new games has come to feel like a burden, even for someone like Wanderbot who is explicitly looking for new games to play and feature: “To be honest, I’m not really excited for how much the release numbers are scaling up for this year and going into the future,” he says. “The systems we have available just aren’t built for this kind of volume.”

So how do you break through? IDLE BOSS RUSH presents us with one possible strategy: a clear and obvious name that immediately positions your game within a genre. I don’t even have to look at the game description to understand what it is. I like the naming formula here of [GENRE] [CONCEPT]. This is something that games in the simulator genre have been doing for a while. Chris Zukowski has written about the importance of a clear name saying:

On Steam I think the most important thing a name does is give people the “vibe” of your genre and theme at a glance. Shoppers spend seconds scanning lists of games that are recommended to them. If they see a game that fits their favorite genre, they will click to read more.

Valve gives you just a few places where you can hint at your genre, so you need to be smart about it. Use a combination of Capsule (aka thumbnail), game title, and tags to get your genre across in those long lists of games.

Irid Games, the team behind IDLE BOSS RUSH, seems to have, at least temporarily, pivoted away from working on their previous title, an early access roguelike-inspired tactics game called Dethroned. The game has reached just $10K in estimated gross revenue with 25 reviews at 76% positive. I’m sure far below the team’s expectations. Dethroned suffers from both genre confusion and, compared to IDLE BOSS RUSH, an unclear name. The Steam page reads:

Lead an army of mythical creatures through a dark fantasy world. In this genre-defying mix of tactics, adventure, and more, you’ll level up your hero, blast monsters with spells, loot and recruit. Explore an unpredictable, non-linear world, where you’ll face Dragons, Titans, Hydras, and... crabs?!

A “genre-defying mix of tactics, adventure, and more” is not specific enough. Put yourself in the shoes of a streamer or YouTuber who does niche, genre-specific let’s plays. You’re scrolling through your inbox looking for the next game to play on stream. You’re inundated with hundreds of emails per day. You see an email about a game called Dethroned and another one about a game called IDLE BOSS RUSH. Which one are you more likely to click?

Thanks for reading and have a great week.

This week there are 205 new releases1 on Steam. 95 are tagged as indie (46%) and 37 of those indies have released a demo (18%).

• >10K wishlists: 16 indie, 13 with demo (81%)

• 1K-10K wishlists: 16 indie, 13 with demo (81%)

• <1,000 wishlists: 63 indie, 11 with demo (17%)

This week I’m looking at a slot machine roguelite, an ultra-fast paced dungeon runner, and a semi-autobiographical life sim. Let’s get into it…

CloverPit

Estimated wishlists: 490K

Release date: September 26, 2025
Steam page created: 11 months ago
Demo info: Released April 10, 2025 / No available review data, demo store page was taken down by the developers

A rogue-lite slot machine nightmare. Gamble for your life in a never-ending debt simulator!

Twitch streamer Northernlion said in his first video featuring the CloverPit demo: “I guess it’s not even out yet, but still, the demo is better than 99% of the games I’ve ever played.” In a follow up video titled Can a demo be GOTY? he said “When the mechanics are good, it doesn’t matter that it’s a demo.” Since the game was announced in April, it has reached an estimated 490K wishlists.

I’ll admit, when I first saw the announcement for CloverPit in April, I had a feeling that it was a bit too on the nose, and maybe a little cloying. The developers, a duo called Panik Arcade, describe the game as “the demonic lovechild of Balatro & Buckshot Roulette.” At the time, it was common to see other indie developers lamenting about the coming onslaught of Balatro clones after it sold millions of copies. But, my first impressions were clearly wrong. The game’s unabashedly direct Balatro-like gambling concept seems to be what has caused it to circulate so widely. CloverPit demonstrates that players want more games like the other ones they love, not less.

It’s useful to look at CloverPit through the framework of the fast follow, a term Chris Zukowski uses to describe games that attempt to draw upon the hype of another recent hit game. Zukowski says:

Sometimes a game becomes a viral hit. It is a magical thing, it is a rare thing, and amazing to watch. A fast follow is a quickly-produced follow-up game made by a competitor to try and capture the ambient success of that viral hit game. A fast-follow is not a clone, but shares about 70% of the same DNA of that hit game.

The CloverPit demo was released 12 months after Buckshot Roulette and 18 months after Balatro. It’s not necessarily the fastest of fast-follows, games like Liar’s Bar quickly released within 6 months, but the long tail success of both games meant CloverPit could still tap into the lingering hype many months later.

CloverPit is connected to a whole range of slot machine-inspired roguelike games released since Luck Be a Landlord in 2021, which Balatro developer Localthunk described as one of his main inspirations. Among these are the creature collector variant Cat God Ranch (1.6K reviews) which places a cute, artistic veneer on top of the core slot machine mechanics, obfuscating them in some way. CloverPit, instead, wholly embraces the slot machine. The core game loop involves the player pulling a lever on a literal slot machine to make (fake) money and meet a threshold or else plummet to their death into the pit below.

CloverPit has successfully leaned into the deviousness of gambling, with its tongue in cheek description explaining “gamble for your life in a never-ending debt simulator!” In contrast, Balatro developer Localthunk has taken great care to disconnect his game from any association with gambling saying “I hate the thought of Balatro becoming a true gambling game”. CloverPit releases amidst a growing iGaming industry as popular sports betting apps FanDuel and DraftKings have released virtual casino apps with slot machine-style gambling games in attempts to expand beyond sports.

Not every player on Steam is clamoring for the latest gambling-inspired roguelike, but mass appeal shouldn’t concern you, as describes in his recent post: “when you try to build something for everyone, you build something for no one.”

The median game on Steam sells 500 copies. The median SaaS product never breaks $10K MRR. They die not because they're bad, but because they're forgettable. They tried so hard not to offend anyone that they failed to delight anyone.

Meanwhile, products with sharp edges - products that actively repel certain users - create something more valuable than broad appeal: they create identity.

See also: GameDiscoverCo covered how the game reached 100K wishlists in one week back in April, other relevant “I’m trapped in a room” games include Inscryption, Buckshot Roulette, Five Nights at Freddy’s, Clickolding, Flathead, and upcoming games PVKK, Death In Your Dice, and Arsonate

Bloodthief

Estimated wishlists: 116K

Release date: September 22, 2025
Steam page created: 26 months ago
Demo info: April 16, 2024 / 555 reviews / 96% positive

Bloodthief is an ultra-fast melee dungeon-runner where you use momentum to parkour through hazardous dungeons and brutally slash through enemies. Speed-run through haunted dungeons and castles and learn what dark secrets lie beneath.

Should you be making devlogs? If you were to ask Bloodthief developer Blargis, he’d probably say yes. Over the past 2 years Blargis has posted 13 devlogs on YouTube, most of them between 15 to 20 minutes long, with his most popular video reaching 2.2M views and 83K likes. His steady growth in wishlists can be directly attributed to the success of his devlogs.

Blargis, who has a day job as a software developer, has been working on Bloodthief part time by himself since at least July 2023. He describes the game as inspired by “Neon White, Ghostrunner, ULTRAKILL, and of course, Quake.” The demo has reached 548 reviews with 96% a positive rating. The game was playtested throughout the very public development process with tight collaboration with players via a discord with over 7000 members.

Blargis took advantage of the often overlooked Steam playtest feature starting early in development in November 2023. Playtests on Steam are similar to demos in that they allow players to try out an early version of the game, but they’re much lower stakes as players expect to encounter bugs and little kinks in the game design here and there. Blargis created a tight marketing funnel with his devlogs serving as a way of getting people interested in the game enough to ultimately play the playtest, and later, the demo, and get involved in the community.

Choo-Choo Charles and CUFFBUST developer Gavin Eisenbeisz has good advice when it comes to creating devlogs. As he explains, your audience is not other game developers it’s your players. Eisenbeisz‘s devlogs for Choo-Choo Charles gained him over 200K wishlists. Many developers who set out to make devlogs end up making something halfway between a technical deep dive and tutorial instead of an entertaining video highlighting what’s fun about the game. Even some of the more popular game dev YouTubers make this mistake. David Wehle, developer of the upcoming farming sim horror game We Harvest Shadows (est. 264K wishlists), commented on Eisenbeisz’s devlog video saying:

This might be literally the best indie marketing video on YouTube, thanks so much Gavin. Pretty sure I mixed my audiences on my channel and now all my videos stagnate and get stuck. Not sure what to do honestly.

If you’re interested in making devlogs, remember your audience is your potential players, not other developers. Follow the format successfully and they can be a great way to market your game and grow a community. I’m looking forward to seeing if the millions of views that Blargis racked up for the Bloodthief devlogs convert to strong sales figures over the next few weeks.

Consume Me

Estimated wishlists: 38K

Release date: September 25, 2025
Steam page created: months ago
Demo: Released May 29, 2025 / 156 reviews / 99% positive

did you feel stupid, fat, lazy, and ugly in high school? well i did...but at least i made a life-simulation RPG about it!

In many ways, the history of computer games is a history of simulation games. Since Microsoft Flight Sim first released in 1982, thousands of games have attempted to mimic reality in ways that are fun and engaging. The life sim is a variant made popular by Will Wright’s The Sims franchise, but which originated with games like Little Computer People (1985) and Princess Maker (1991). More recent examples like Long Live the Queen extend the spreadsheet-like gameplay seen in Princess Maker where the core mechanics revolve around managing an often overwhelming list of different stats and resources.

Consume Me combines gameplay systems typical of life sim games with WarioWare style mini games and a “darkly funny coming-of-age story”. The player must juggle a growing list of daily tasks while carefully balancing main character Jenny’s diet and hunger levels to get her through her final year of high school. The game was developed by a team of 4 and began as a prototype made in 2018 by artist Jenny Jiao Hsia at NYU Game Center in a class taught by Bennett Foddy of Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy fame.

It was later presented as a part of an exhibition titled Videogames: Design/Play/Disrupt at V&A Dundee, a museum in Dundee, Scotland. In 2019, the team received funding from Kowloon Knights, an organization that provides development money in exchange for a revenue cut, but doesn’t act as a publisher in the traditional sense as they don’t handle marketing and distribution. Kowloon Knights have supported projects with budgets that range from $100K to $10M including Sifu, Hell Clock, and Keep Driving.

Creator and core team member Jenny Jiao Hsia has over 11K followers on Instagram and regularly posted videos throughout development promoting the game that often reached a few hundred likes. The game was covered by The Guardian in August shortly after the demo was released on Steam. It has already been a critical darling far before launch, it was the recipient of the Seumas McNally Grand Prize and the Nuovo Award at the Independent Games Festival at GDC earlier this year.

It will be interesting to see if Consume Me can find commercial success within its niche as it’s an example of a game that doesn’t fully embrace established genre conventions. It attempts to straddle the line between the systemic depth of the life sim genre, the chaotic playfulness of minigame-driven games, and narrative games with a social message. You could draw similarities to recent release to a T, which was developed by Keita Takahashi, creator of Katamari Damacy, and based on the numbers, it seems likely that the game will perform similarly. Both games reached wishlist numbers moderately above the typical discoverability threshold of 10K. to a T was well reviewed, but failed to break through selling just an estimated 4,700 copies on Steam. Consume Me could ultimately perform better among console players if it’s eventually ported to the Switch 2. Narrative driven games sometimes find a wider audience on Switch compared to Steam.

Thanks for reading and have a great week.

And why did Universal, the mightiest studio of all, pass on Star Wars, a decision that just may cost them, when all the sequels and spinoffs and toy money and book money and video-game money are totaled, over a billion dollars? Because nobody, nobody—not now, not ever—knows the least goddam thing about what is or isn’t going to work at the box office.

But clearly Goldman himself knew a thing or two about writing hits. His 17 films grossed a total $655 million worldwide and he racked up 11 awards and 15 nominations including 2 Oscars and 3 Golden Globes.

Even if we admit that some people know something about success, some still view the very attempt to understand the market as counterproductive to real, raw creativity. The market is the apple in the Garden of Eden of creativity. Take one bite and you’ll turn into one of those slithering suits who is forever cursed to design by committee. And for indies who pride themselves on authentic artistic expression, there’s nothing worse than coming across as a calculating suit. In an interview on IGN, game director of Metaphor: ReFantazio and the Persona games, Katsura Hashino said:

“I feel like if you have these super highly polished games that look like they were designed by a bunch of people in a CEO boardroom, that doesn’t really excite me — it doesn’t really interest me”, he admits, bluntly. “But when I see these sorts of games [which reveal a little about the people that made them], it really fills me with the motivation to keep developing,” he says. “That these artists, these creatives, had something they really wanted to say is where I get all of my inspiration from, and the drive to continue to be creative myself.”

I learned as much when my postmortem, Why Our Game Flopped, circulated among a group of indie developers on X earlier this year. Many posters were eager to point out that it was my very attempt at market analysis that was the cause of my commercial failure. One reply said: “This is how you know you're going to fail. Just make a good game and stop worrying about it.” Their advice was: just dream big.

I think they’re dead wrong here. Not “worrying about it” is avoidant and risky. I’d rather take Ambrook founder Mackenzie Burnett’s advice and reframe worry as de-risking. We should use market analysis to our advantage, to ground our wildest dreams.

Onto the Wishlist Rundown for this week…

No, I'm not a Human

Estimated wishlists: 715K

Release date: September 15, 2025
Steam page created: 12 months ago
Demo info: Released June 8, 2025 / 956 reviews / 98% positive

WARNING. Stay inside. Lock your doors. Close the blinds. Only let humans in. Eliminate all Visitors. An anxiety horror about paranoia in the End of Times.

No, I’m not a Human feels like a perfect encapsulation of what players are looking for from shorter indie horror games on Steam. An early version of the game was released in August 2024 as a part of the the horror game anthology Violent Horror Stories. YouTuber Jacksepticeye got a hold of it a few months later and called it “one of the best new horror games.” The game clearly had strong appeal even in its early state.

It was signed by prolific bizzarro horror-ish games publisher CRITICAL REFLEX (publisher of Buckshot Roulette) sometime around December 2024. At the time it had amassed around 200K wishlists. The Steam page for the full game had been live for only a couple months. Crazy numbers! The developers, Trioskaz, released an updated demo in June coinciding with Steam Next Fest and it continued to gain visibility from there.

The core gameplay loop of No, I’m Not a Human is reminiscent of inspection games like Papers Please or Quarantine Zone: The Last Check and spot-the-difference or anomaly games like The Cabin Factory. You chat with visitors seeking shelter through the peephole at your front door and choose whether or not to let them in. The characters are creepy looking and the dialogue is just vague enough to keep you wondering what’s really going on outside. Screenshots of the game really pop with strong art direction causing the game to stand out immediately at a glance.

I’m sure we’ll start to see more horror games that deploy a branching, almost roguelike-flavored, run-based, narrative structure like this. It seems to be a great way to keep the all important average playtime and concurrent user metrics up in a genre that’s typically known (at least in the case of indies) for shorter games that you can finish in one sitting.

See also: Who’s at the door?, another recent door-based inspection/anomaly horror game that sold well, and the intentionally dumbed down pitch form from CRITICAL REFLEX that’s worth checking out if you’ve got a particularly weird game and need a publisher, and TROLEU (est. 47K wishlists) another game published by CRITICAL REFLEX coming out this week.

If you’re unfamiliar with how Steam follower counts are used to estimate wishlists, or just unfamiliar with the wishlist metric altogether, see these helpful breakdowns from How To Market A Game here and from GameDiscoverCo here and here.

Henry Halfhead

Estimated wishlists: 40K wishlists

Release date: September 16, 2025
Steam page created: 31 months ago
Demo info: Released but removed from Steam before launch

Meet Henry, merely half a head, yet with the peculiar ability to become any object within their reach! Discover every object’s unique abilities and cleverly combine them to take Henry through their not-so-ordinary everyday life.

Henry Halfhead is a playful sandbox game with a colorful art style reminiscent of Untitled Goose Game where you can become any object within reach and generally just wreck havoc. Players on Steam love sandbox games. Chris Zukowski of How To Market A Game has highlighted this previously saying:

These games are like marble mazes or domino tracks. The are digital Rube Goldberg machines. The point of the game is to setup a strange scenario then push play and see what happens. They typically rely on hilarious physics, jank, buggy behaviors, glitches, and explosions.

The first few seconds of the trailer for Henry Halfhead shows a sequence where the player (get ready)…becomes a chair and slides under a table, then transforms into an apple on the floor, hops onto the chair and onto the table, then rolls towards a plate, morphs into a knife and cuts the apple up into pieces only to switch back to the default “halfhead” character and devour the freshly sliced apple pieces.

And of course, a clip of this very sequence blew up on TikTok in March 2023 racking up 136K views and 1462 likes. The emergent, playful humor in these sorts of sandbox games is a key part of their appeal. Good sandbox games are, what you could call, clippable. With sandbox games, random moments of gameplay can be readily captured by players and streamers alike to post on social media.

Henry Halfhead was developed by a team of 6 over the course of 5 years. This long development timeline screams risky to me for a small indie, but it seems like the team did a good job validating the game as they went. The game started as a student project in 2020 and was later announced in the MIX Showcase in 2023 and subsequently featured in Wholesome Direct and Day of the Devs. It’s also important to point out that the game was at least in part funded by the Swiss Arts Council. The team has received at least $128,000 in grant funding over the past five years. It looks like the game has impressive systemic depth and it’s certainly not the kind of project that could be realized on a shoestring budget. Grants can be a good option for certain types of games. Let me know if you want to see a post where I deep dive into grants for games.

I’m a little surprised the game doesn’t have more wishlists than it does. We’ll keep an eye on how well it sells. 40K is well beyond the often-cited 10K wishlists you need to have a chance at wider visibility on Steam but, when you spread it out over the course of the 31 months that the Steam page has been live that’s just 1.2K wishlists per month. This pales in comparison to the other two games in this rundown which had significantly shorter development times and are launching with much higher wishlist counts with Easy Deliver Co. averaging 18.3K per month and No, I’m not a Human averaging 58K per month.

See also: Everything, the game where you can become a frog, a tiny particle, a galaxy and everything in between, and mouthful mode in Kirby and the Forgotten Land.

Easy Delivery Co.

Estimated wishlists: 203K

Release date: September 18, 2025
Steam page created: 11 months ago
Demo: Released April 24, 2025 / 1,104 reviews / 97% positive

Easy Delivery Co. is a relaxing driving game with strange secrets. Chill out, make deliveries and get to know the mysterious residents of this scenic mountain town, all while earning well below minimum wage. Play at your own pace or play in split-screen race mode with up to four players.

Looking at screenshots of Easy Delivery Co. gives you the sense that this game was destined to reach wide visibility on Steam just purely due to “the vibes”. The game features exploration and job sim-style gameplay with cute animal crossing-inspired characters set in an open world cozy mountain town all wrapped in a retro PS1 look. At the time of the demo release, an article on Vice said:

Something about Easy Delivery Co. is slightly unsettling, but I mean that in the most positive of ways. There’s something a bit off about this town. But I can’t help but soak in the vibes as I cruise down the street. The bed of my truck is loaded up with deliveries and ready to be dropped off at the earliest possible time. It’s creepy and kooky, mysterious and spooky, but most importantly, it’s also incredibly adorable.

The Steam page for the game was published in November 2024. It received its first bump in wishlists on January 19, 2025 when this clip (see embed below) was posted by the developer, Sam C, on X. It reached 173K views and 5.9K likes and brought in about 500 wishlists (rough approximation from looking at the follower graph). The game really began to take off with the launch of the demo in April 2025 which coincided with a reveal trailer posted by GameTrailers. Subsequent clips posted by the developer on X have regularly surpassed tens of thousands of views.

Easy Delivery Co. was made by solo developer Sam C. It seems to have been in development for at least a year with Reddit posts from the developer dating back to September 2024. A couple of these posts on Reddit performed relatively well reaching over 1K upvotes, but from the looks of the followers graph below they didn’t have much of an effect on wishlists. Good early validation nonetheless. The game was picked up by Oro Interactive around the time of the demo release. They’re a new publisher that puts out “catchy, creator-focused games” and has a novel operating model with their website explaining:

YOU DEVELOP. WE PUBLISH.

We act as an external "in-house" publishing branch. We know, weird right.

This basically means that you can focus on creating games and we take care of (and pay for) everything else: marketing, PR, localization, playtesting, and QA. Porting TBD on context.

On occasions, we provide project funding up to a maximum of $50,000.

As the number of games on Steam continues to grow, some creators are finding it more difficult to sift through the overwhelming number of releases. Perhaps this creator-focused publishing model will become more common. Publishers can serve as both a middle man for developers and a curator for creators.

See also: See other games published by Oro Interactive including Murky Divers and Order 13 along with upcoming games Dead Format and Roadside Research, which I mentioned in my post Six months or bust here:

Thanks for reading and have a great week.