The Art of the Follow-Up

What do you do after striking game dev gold? (Probably crash out)

Each year a few lucky indie games—just a handful of rare jewels—manage to get enough word-of-mouth success to reach “canonical” status.

These are games that truly broke out. Way beyond the limitations of what you’d normally consider possible for any given genre.¹ They’re the titles you think of first when somebody says “indie games.”

Slay the Spire, Hollow Knight, Stardew Valley, Celeste, Minecraft. Each has sold millions of copies. But that’s not the only things these games have in common:

• They’re all at least seven years old

• None of their creators have shipped another game since their breakout hit

That’s not to say these devs aren’t working. Slay the Spire II is probably coming out this year. The Hollow Knight devs recently confirmed in a tweet reply that long-sought sequel Silksong “is real” and still in development. Minecraft creator Notch took a decade long break after selling to Microsoft and outbidding Jay-Z and Beyoncé on a Beverly Hills mansion, before recently announcing his intention to make “Minecraft 2” (which I’m sure raised eyebrows at Microsoft).

But for others, things are going less well. Stardew creator Eric Barone recently admitted that follow-up game Haunted Chocolatier has been getting “dusty on the shelf.” But that’s just because he can’t stop updating Stardew. Sadder news came this week, when Celeste lead Maddy Thorson announced the cancellation of follow-up project Earthblade after a falling out with the game’s lead artist, Pedro Medeiros.

Thorson’s blog about the cancellation included this confession:

Celeste's success applied pressure on us to deliver something bigger and better with Earthblade, and that pressure is a large part of why working on it has become so exhausting. Pedro isn't to blame for this—in fact the split with him has given us the clarity to see that we have lost our way, and the opportunity to admit defeat. I feel many ways about it, but one big feeling is undoubtedly relief.

—Maddy Thorson, writing on the Extremely Okay Games blog

There was so much pressure to make a “bigger and better” game that cancelling it came as a relief!

What goes unsaid here is that there was also probably a distinct lack of pressure to finish the game, because canonical indie games like Celeste tend to be perennial sellers. These games sell tens of thousands of copies every month for years on end.

Based on its monthly reviews data, Celeste seems to be selling between 30,000 and 60,000 units each month on Steam alone.² It often goes on sale for $4.99, but basic math says it’s likely life-changing money for such a small dev team.

Monthly new reviews for Celeste, courtesy of SteamDB

I’m not pointing this out as some sort of gotcha—I empathize with their situation. How much could any of us expect to ship if our budget justified infinite dev time? And meanwhile, the voice in your head is saying you’ve gotta blow them away or you’ll be seen as a failure. No wonder Earthblade got axed.

Think about the perspective of the devs on Hollow Knight: Silksong. In recent years it has become a recurring meme for Twitch users to spam “Silksong???” in the chat during literally any game announcement. All of those shitposters are just adding pressure on the dev team to deliver something worthy of that hype. It has to feel suffocating. The devs at Team Cherry must be feeling immense pressure to produce something “bigger and better,” while lacking any sort of financial pressure pushing them to ship faster, because Hollow Knight has been selling many tens of thousands of copies every month for the better part of a decade.

Monthly new reviews for Hollow Knight, courtesy of SteamDB.

These devs got exactly what every indie dev thinks they want: a massive, global, breakout hit. And the result is psychological paralysis. The money is great, I’m sure, but you still have to feel for them.

What do you do after striking game dev gold?

For most, the answer seems to be: crash out majorly.

And for this very reason, I think you really have to respect those indie devs that manage to just keep shipping games after launching a megahit.

This brings us to Peglin and its developer, Red Nexus Games.

Peglin is literally “what if Peggle (Pachinko) was a roguelike.” It’s a simple idea, executed with skill. So it sold extremely well, making over $1 million in its first week on Steam Early Access and continuing to sell well across platforms in the years that have followed.

It didn’t do anything like Hollow Knight numbers, but for a team of only six people (three core team members at Red Nexus plus others), Peglin was definitely a hit.

I started thinking about Peglin recently because I noticed that a popular indie gaming account on X included it in this meme:

Source: Best Indie Games on X

There Peglin is, right in there with legends like Hades II and Balatro. This is the sort of unexplainable word-of-mouth promo that really great indie games can get.

I wondered: what else have the Peglin devs released? And sure enough, just a few months ago they put out a cute little side-scrolling platformer. The concept is clever: you play as an egg and you’ll splatter if you fall too far. Also, your basic jump ability throws you so high into the air that it’ll break your shell if you don’t find somewhere high up to land.

I spent hours playing Fowl Damage this week and absolutely adored my time with it. It’s one of the best platformers I’ve played in recent years.

And yet, the game is not a hit. Months after launch, it only has 84 reviews. At most, they’ve sold a few thousand copies.

Fowl Damage on Steam.

“We really didn't see much carryover from that Peglin audience over to Fowl Damage unfortunately,” admits Dylan Gedig, founder of Red Nexus Games. “We're hopeful that if we make a game in genres closer to Peglin that more of our existing audience will be interested in the next one, but it's clear that we can't just put out any good game (Fowl Damage has been really well-reviewed) and expect it to sell well.”

This has got to feel frustrating because Peglin was absolutely one of those good games that inexplicably sold well. According to interviews Gedig did after its launch, the game simply performed well in festivals on Steam, with streamers, and with players. The Steam algorithm rewarded it accordingly.

“It was just supposed to be a pretty casual hobby project,” Gedig told me. And yet, it popped off.

A quick Q&A with Gedig follows:

PUSH TO TALK: Was there anything from the go-to-market strategy for Peglin where you felt like "we really nailed this?”

DYLAN GEDIG: Honestly we were really just in the right place at the right time. When the pandemic happened I really just wanted to work on something lighthearted and simple, and it turned out that's what a lot of players were looking for too. We got really involved in a lot of the digital events that replaced physical events, and since we were making demos for our friends anyway we were in a good place to get involved in those events, which led to a lot of streamers discovering the game.

Any generalized thoughts about your approach to game discovery and how it's changed over time?

The last year has certainly gotten a lot more difficult. We took Fowl Damage to every event it was accepted into, which took a lot of time, energy, and money (compared to digital events); and we still found it much more difficult to gain wishlists and get attention than we did with Peglin. Talking with other indie devs, it sounds like it's been a lot harder for newer games in general, though existing/established indies like Balatro and Peglin are still doing really well.

IMHO I think side-scrolling platformers might just be "hard mode" to market, though the premise for Fowl Damage is definitely really interesting.

Yeah puzzle-platformers are notoriously difficult to cross that virality threshold for sure. We figured with an interesting premise and replayability baked in the form of a level editor that we'd be able to beat the odds, but we knew it was going to be a battle. We're hopeful that if we can find a good partner for console publishing that we can do better there, since console players have more nostalgia for retro-aesthetic platformers than PC gamers on average.

We're still working on a couple last major updates for Peglin while slowly prototyping out different ideas, our next game will definitely either be in the roguelike space and/or the physics space though, so that we can appeal to a broader chunk of our audience (and tap into what Steam gamers tend to be drawn to a bit more).

On a personal level, why are you in game development? What motivates you—what makes you care?

I love the combination of art, business, and development. I can't think of many other disciplines that allow you to stretch so many creative, technical, and practical muscles to create something that is entertaining and interactive. It helps that making games is just a ton of fun as well!

Do you have a "dream game" you're building toward as a dev? Or more like finding your way as you go along?

I think in the past I would've really loved to make a big moody Earthbound-inspired indie RPG (pretty sure this is the goal of at least 50% of all indie devs, haha) but honestly with how fun Peglin has been to work on (and to play still, surprisingly) I could see myself staying in the arcadey roguelike space for quite a while—I think there's still a lot to be explored in this space and I think players are still excited for new experiments in the genre given how incredibly massive games like Balatro have been recently.

Fowl Damage deserves 1,000x the sales it’s gotten thus far, but Gedig isn’t sweating it. He’s planning the next few Peglin updates and the games after that.

This is why I like the Peglin team. They’re humble, smart, and willing to pick themselves up and have another go. I hope they keep shipping new games whether the next one is a monster hit or another under-appreciated gem.

Whatever Red Nexus—or any other game dev—makes next, they’ll release into a market with more new game releases than ever, and where most players aren’t even paying attention to new titles.

In an environment like this, where it’s nearly impossible to peel players’ attention away from the tried and true hits, what should devs do? For those that have struck game dev gold once before, that’s just more added pressure in a pressure cooker of a market.

Most crash out. But some keep digging.

That’s it for this week. I’m gonna go scramble some eggs.

I’ll see you next Friday.

1. It’s hard to differentiate between a mere “hit” indie game and a truly canonical indie game, but I think it’s mostly about longevity. How long will people care? IMO the two most recent indie games that stand the best chance of entering this pantheon are Balatro and—maybe less obviously—Core Keeper.

2. A conservative estimate. And remember, Celeste was a hit on consoles as well.