8 ms·

It depends on what you mean by "true" indie games. Valheim [1][2], by any reasonable interpretation of the word, is a completely indie game. It was made almost

It depends on what you mean by "true" indie games. Valheim [1][2], by any reasonable interpretation of the word, is a completely indie game. It was made almost entirely by a single guy in his spare time after work, well at least until it blew up and he was able to expand the studio. And it was released with little more than a post on itch.io - 'Hey guys here's my game and a couple of pics. Let me know what you think.' And of course it did exceptionally well, because it's just a very good game. In my opinion now is currently the absolute golden age for indie development of all sorts. But the catch is you actually need to make really good stuff. Just making a functioning game isn't really sufficient. There's even still a huge market for stuff that looks like it came from a 24 hour game-jam codeathon, but it needs to be fun. Check out Forager [3] for instance. As a warning, play that game for an hour - and you'll be playing it for 10 (or 100) because it's really just insanely fun. And that's really all it is. The "problem" is that it's just become really (relatively) easy to make games. And so just making a functioning complete game is no longer any sort of real achievement. It needs to be fun. Make a game where people, with no connection or bias for you, will organically recommend it - and you're going to succeed. [1] - https://store.steampowered.com/app/892970/Valheim/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/892970/Valheim/ [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valheim#Development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valheim#Development [3] - https://store.steampowered.com/app/751780/Forager/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/751780/Forager/

bigger_inside 3y ago
don't forget Rimworld. One guy making a huge and sprawling game that ignored the studio sensibilities and became hit (and a couple of memes).
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  Rimworld (and I'm sure Stardew will also be mentioned) came out years ago though; sure, the indie market was hopping back then too, but it's gotten worse since then.
  - Etherlord87 3y ago
    > Rimworld [...] came out years ago though; Rimworld was released in 2018, two years after the article was written (2016)
    - lfowles 3y ago
      2013* It spent a long time in Early Access and was already a beloved game by the time 1.0 released.
      - Etherlord87 3y ago
        That's a fair argument, I was one of the backers and I pretty much stopped playing the game (long) before it was released (still well spent money).
- hhmc 3y ago
  > that ignored the studio sensibilities I mean, it's strongly 'inspired' by dwarf fortress, so any heterodox design credit mostly belongs there
  - bigger_inside 3y ago
    design credit, absolutely! I'm speaking of Yayo and human leather hats, though. :D
cubefox 3y ago
Of course there are some successful indie games! But the only relevant thing is the probability that any one game will be successful. That chance is very small.
- somenameforme 3y ago
  I don't see what the average would matter, because not all games are created equal. It's kind of like the Steven King / Richard Bachman experiment [1]. The question he was answering was not how likely a random author was to succeed, but how likely a good author was to succeed. So it seems that the important question is what are the odds of a genuinely good game going unrecognized, flopping completely? What are the odds of a Valheim failing? And I think that percent is extremely near zero. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Bachman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Bachman
  - cubefox 3y ago
    I think the probability is quite high that even fairly good games will flop, because there are so many indie developers, and because the tools are so advanced. So only the best of the best will succeed, or those which satisfy some unique niche, or which somehow already have an established brand.
    - Xen9 3y ago
      I agree with you and Keyle.
    - somenameforme 3y ago
      If you're correct, then this would mean there are countless genuinely great games on e.g. Steam going completely untouched that would otherwise be megahits if people simply knew about them. This sets up countless amazing commercial opportunities if you are correct, that are seemingly just going completely untapped. But for the more simplistic purposes of our discussion, can you think of any particularly compelling examples? Basically I'm arguing that there is no black swan. It's not really hard to refute it, if I'm wrong, because all you need to do is point to one. I suppose the inevitable outcome might be we then hem and haw back and forth about whether something is "good", but well - at least it's a reasonable evidence based starting point, yeah?
somat 3y ago
Valheim is not an indie game, it is published by coffee stain studios. Now it is a small dev team, and they defiantly take the slow burn approach to development. Both common traits to independent developers. And good for coffee stain publishing to let them develop this way. But... I don't think I am being too pedantic in saying indie means independently published, and if you have a company publishing your title... you are not indie.
- MattRix 3y ago
  Indie is about whether some other company is controlling what you make. This means you can make an indie game even if it is published by another studio (like with Valheim).
- m_0x 3y ago
  None of coffee stain studios are AAA games. I think there's a blurry line that separates indie games to non-indie games. Sure stardew valley is an indie game and God of War is not. But those are the extremes of the spectrum. Is Hades an indie game? It is developed and published by Supergiant Games, but at this point is really well known and funded.
  - somat 3y ago
    I think that definitely language has shifted a bit, and terminology that used to mean "artist that is unable or does not want to get a publishing contract" now means "small limited resource artist". I mean for gods sake there are "indie" publishing companies now. Which I regard as this amazing contradiction in terminology. But yes, my pedantic side insists that if a large well funded game(or movie or song) uses the same legal entity to fund the game as was used to build it. They are independent and may fairly use the term "indie". Steam is a weird kink in the rules, because they are technically publishing all these games. But I hand wave that away by claiming that they are a market not a publisher(the difference being that a publisher takes on risk by paying you before the work is done).
freeCandy 3y ago
Valheim and such games are very much exceptions to this, for every successful indie game released, there is an ocean of unsuccessful games out there and that may be equally as good, or even better than Valheim.
- sam0x17 3y ago
  That said, procedurally generated games have a much harder time failing.
  - MattRix 3y ago
    This is really not true.
    - sam0x17 3y ago
      I've literally never seen one that isn't doing well though
- Etherlord87 3y ago
  Can you fuel your argument with some examples? I hear the argument in similar forms a lot, how a lot of good games failed because of bad marketing or just no luck. But I never see any examples. The response I get to my question is usually "I don't know of an example precisely because it never got popular", but I find it very fallacious - if there's thousands of good games out there, that failed to be popular, surely you would stumble into a few of them. A claim that a game either is popular and makes money, or is not popular and no one ever hears about it - is a false dichotomy.
  - SamoyedFurFluff 3y ago
    I have a one that immediately comes to mind: Chicory, A Colorful Tale is way less successful than it should be. It’s a cross between a Zelda style game (upgrades, bosses, dungeons, exploration) with a coloring book (you color the world) with a deeply touching plot about impostor syndrome and the pressures of being labeled a talented artist. It has a huge number of accessibility features, co-op mode, an amazing ost, difficulty settings, runs like butter, and is all in all a super polished game. IMO this was GOTY shit and I don’t know why it didn’t take off.
notThrowingAway 3y ago
>Forager This is offtopic but the forager lead dev is often criticized for claiming to be a solo dev and taking credit for other people who worked on the game. https://indiecator.org/2021/04/14/forager-the-rise-and-fall https://indiecator.org/2021/04/14/forager-the-rise-and-fall
ZephyrBlu 3y ago
> Make a game where people, with no connection or bias for you, will organically recommend it - and you're going to succeed I.e. "make a fun game that has organic viral growth" As if developers don't want to do that. You have not provided any information of value here. Organic viral growth is extremely rare, and "fun" is a useless descriptor for someone trying to replicate "fun" in their own game. Why would developers want to make a game that isn't fun? "build it and they will come" is almost always a lie, and the times it's not (I.e. organic viral growth) are not replicable. If you're making something you have to solve for distribution. Just making the thing isn't enough for it to succeed.
- _gabe_ 3y ago
  > Why would developers want to make a game that isn't fun? Of course nobody wants to make a game that isn't fun. But I know just how easy it is to get caught up into the "hustle" mentality where all you're focused on is getting the features complete. Once you're in this mindset, it becomes very easy to realize that your own game isn't even fun to you. This simple reminder is huge, should be repeated often, and is great advice. Make a game that you would enjoy playing for hours on end, and you'll likely gather an audience of people that also enjoy it. It really is amazing at how easy it is to forget this and end up building a game that even you, the creator, don't enjoy playing very much. Likewise, it's very easy to focus on small slices of gameplay and ignore the cohesiveness of the entire game. If different mechanics are super fun, but aren't fun together, you will have created a game that isn't fun.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    I've seen enough games I have enjoyed for hours that remain a small (talking triple digits, at best) undiscovered niche to know that this is simply no longer true. Maybe it was true in 2016 when this article is posted, but not anymore. Many games aren't fun, but many games are fun enough or are marketed well enough. You won't stand a chance without going above and beyond in one of the two executions.
- Hermitian909 3y ago
  > Why would developers want to make a game that isn't fun? I mean, why do people want to write buggy software? It's not on purpose, they're just not good enough to deliver quality in a timely fashion. My experience with most indie games cannot deliver on a core gameplay loop that's satisfying, even when that loop is not the draw of the game in which case I'd expect them to ape something competent. IMO an example of a studio that doesn't mess this up is Giant Games. I've liked some titles more or less but the core gameplay loop has always been competently designed.
MattRix 3y ago
As someone who has been working as an indie game dev for the past 13 years, I think you’ve got a pretty unrealistic view of the situation. You can’t just make a “good game” anymore. The tastes of the market get more demanding over time. To put it another way, the bar for what constitutes a “good game” gets more and more difficult every year. There are successful games from a few years ago that would not get any sales if released today.
- maribi 3y ago
  [dead]
- andsoitis 3y ago
  > The tastes of the market get more demanding over time. That seems to me to be true of most (every) industries / areas of human endeavor?
  - MattRix 3y ago
    It probably is, but because games are such a new medium, the rate it’s advancing (not just in terms of tech, but also in design and audience expectations) is quite rapid. It means if you work on a single game for a few years, by the time you release it the demands of the market may have changed dramatically.
    - toyg 3y ago
      But do they really? It's not the '80s/'90s, genres are somewhat fossilized by now. Some things do change, but they tend to be refinements of well-established concepts. In fact, I'd argue that, having managed to kill the assumption that "newer game == more lifelike graphics" (possibly still valid for AAA, but only there), has dramatically lowered audience expectations in recent years.
      - MattRix 3y ago
        Tech is only a small part of what I’m talking about. I mean more that the standards have risen significantly as far as the quality of art style and polish, and the sophistication of gameplay and metagame depth.
rcxdude 3y ago
I think games like that, where it's a small team and they grow to great success from essentially just word of mouth, are very much lightning in a bottle. It's not just a case of good game design, it's the right kind of game for the time, and well as a fair amount of luck that the snowball starts rolling at the start. It is true that the conditions have more or less never been better for it to happen (arguably it was easier before the market was as saturated as it is now), it's just very rare for it to happen to any given game, even with good execution.
dbspin 3y ago
You're describing survivorship bias. It's impossible for you to know about the great games that you haven't heard about. I'd suggest listening to the devs on this one. I can attest that 'the cream rises to the top' isn't remotely true in areas I know more about - short stories, movies, music. There is indeed lots of cream (in addition to lots more crap with money behind it) at the top. there's also lots of cream, vast gallons to stretch the metaphor, sinking always. Especially now perhaps, in our era of vastly greater content production and a well established arms race of advertising and marketing.
- karpierz 3y ago
  Can you point to some great movies that didn't see any success this year?
- strken 3y ago
  Which great games are pulling less than 1k steam sales? Or have just a handful of reviews? I've found some games I like with very low review count, but they're all clunky and whimsical, or extremely short, or can't be played without pestering the people you live with, or shoot themselves in the foot in other ways. At some point the needle to hay ratio becomes untenable and searching the whole haystack is no longer possible for a single person. You can still randomly sample the stack, though, and rely on the opinions of others to find what you personally missed, and good games with mass appeal do tend to rise a little bit from random players stumbling across them; maybe not to blockbuster status or even profitability, but enough that a game with a marketing budget should get more than 21 Steam reviews if it's genuinely appealing. There's really not a lot of cream at the very bottom.
- somenameforme 3y ago
  Why are 'you' (in the general sense, you're far from the only one doing this) implying this is an incomplete information game? Steam has absolutely excellent tools for content discovery, and the vast majority of people use them actively. And due to the effectively perpetual nature not only of Steam, but also even of console stores now a days - there really is no 'survivorship.' There are games released [literally] 30 years ago now being discovered by new users, and making new sales. And that isn't just some sort of academic point I'm making. Seemingly the overwhelming majority of indie success stories are achieving long-tail success now a days. Increasing numbers of indie games released like a decade ago are having better play figures today than they did at launch. This includes both the extremely well known titles like Terraria [1], as well as those that are still relatively unknown like Kenshi [2]. [1] - https://steamcharts.com/app/105600 https://steamcharts.com/app/105600 [2] - https://steamcharts.com/app/233860 https://steamcharts.com/app/233860
passwordsarehar 3y ago
It is objectively a good game yes, but you're glossing over how it also released with _extremely fortuitous_ timing for the type of game it is: a casual small-group-multiplayer survival exploration builder that leans more toward a lighthearted experience as opposed to the sweaty/hardcore experience which is/was the norm for these types of games. Valheim dropped early 2021, just into the 2nd year of real COVID measures including lockdowns and an overall social atmosphere of "stay hunkered down at home and don't go anywhere". It was absolutely perfect timing, and I am 100% convinced it would not have done _nearly_ as well if it released 1 year earlier or 1 year later. It's hard to make a shitty game successful without a AAA marketing budget sure, but it's also hard to make a good game successful without either a AAA marketing budget, or great luck/timing.

bigger_inside 3y ago

don't forget Rimworld. One guy making a huge and sprawling game that ignored the studio sensibilities and became hit (and a couple of memes).

Cthulhu_ 3y ago
Rimworld (and I'm sure Stardew will also be mentioned) came out years ago though; sure, the indie market was hopping back then too, but it's gotten worse since then.
- Etherlord87 3y ago
  > Rimworld [...] came out years ago though; Rimworld was released in 2018, two years after the article was written (2016)
  - lfowles 3y ago
    2013* It spent a long time in Early Access and was already a beloved game by the time 1.0 released.
    - Etherlord87 3y ago
      That's a fair argument, I was one of the backers and I pretty much stopped playing the game (long) before it was released (still well spent money).
hhmc 3y ago
> that ignored the studio sensibilities I mean, it's strongly 'inspired' by dwarf fortress, so any heterodox design credit mostly belongs there
- bigger_inside 3y ago
  design credit, absolutely! I'm speaking of Yayo and human leather hats, though. :D

cubefox 3y ago

Of course there are some successful indie games! But the only relevant thing is the probability that any one game will be successful. That chance is very small.

somenameforme 3y ago
I don't see what the average would matter, because not all games are created equal. It's kind of like the Steven King / Richard Bachman experiment [1]. The question he was answering was not how likely a random author was to succeed, but how likely a good author was to succeed. So it seems that the important question is what are the odds of a genuinely good game going unrecognized, flopping completely? What are the odds of a Valheim failing? And I think that percent is extremely near zero. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Bachman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Bachman
- cubefox 3y ago
  I think the probability is quite high that even fairly good games will flop, because there are so many indie developers, and because the tools are so advanced. So only the best of the best will succeed, or those which satisfy some unique niche, or which somehow already have an established brand.
  - Xen9 3y ago
    I agree with you and Keyle.
  - somenameforme 3y ago
    If you're correct, then this would mean there are countless genuinely great games on e.g. Steam going completely untouched that would otherwise be megahits if people simply knew about them. This sets up countless amazing commercial opportunities if you are correct, that are seemingly just going completely untapped. But for the more simplistic purposes of our discussion, can you think of any particularly compelling examples? Basically I'm arguing that there is no black swan. It's not really hard to refute it, if I'm wrong, because all you need to do is point to one. I suppose the inevitable outcome might be we then hem and haw back and forth about whether something is "good", but well - at least it's a reasonable evidence based starting point, yeah?

somat 3y ago

Valheim is not an indie game, it is published by coffee stain studios. Now it is a small dev team, and they defiantly take the slow burn approach to development. Both common traits to independent developers. And good for coffee stain publishing to let them develop this way. But... I don't think I am being too pedantic in saying indie means independently published, and if you have a company publishing your title... you are not indie.

MattRix 3y ago
Indie is about whether some other company is controlling what you make. This means you can make an indie game even if it is published by another studio (like with Valheim).
m_0x 3y ago
None of coffee stain studios are AAA games. I think there's a blurry line that separates indie games to non-indie games. Sure stardew valley is an indie game and God of War is not. But those are the extremes of the spectrum. Is Hades an indie game? It is developed and published by Supergiant Games, but at this point is really well known and funded.
- somat 3y ago
  I think that definitely language has shifted a bit, and terminology that used to mean "artist that is unable or does not want to get a publishing contract" now means "small limited resource artist". I mean for gods sake there are "indie" publishing companies now. Which I regard as this amazing contradiction in terminology. But yes, my pedantic side insists that if a large well funded game(or movie or song) uses the same legal entity to fund the game as was used to build it. They are independent and may fairly use the term "indie". Steam is a weird kink in the rules, because they are technically publishing all these games. But I hand wave that away by claiming that they are a market not a publisher(the difference being that a publisher takes on risk by paying you before the work is done).

freeCandy 3y ago

Valheim and such games are very much exceptions to this, for every successful indie game released, there is an ocean of unsuccessful games out there and that may be equally as good, or even better than Valheim.

sam0x17 3y ago
That said, procedurally generated games have a much harder time failing.
- MattRix 3y ago
  This is really not true.
  - sam0x17 3y ago
    I've literally never seen one that isn't doing well though
Etherlord87 3y ago
Can you fuel your argument with some examples? I hear the argument in similar forms a lot, how a lot of good games failed because of bad marketing or just no luck. But I never see any examples. The response I get to my question is usually "I don't know of an example precisely because it never got popular", but I find it very fallacious - if there's thousands of good games out there, that failed to be popular, surely you would stumble into a few of them. A claim that a game either is popular and makes money, or is not popular and no one ever hears about it - is a false dichotomy.
- SamoyedFurFluff 3y ago
  I have a one that immediately comes to mind: Chicory, A Colorful Tale is way less successful than it should be. It’s a cross between a Zelda style game (upgrades, bosses, dungeons, exploration) with a coloring book (you color the world) with a deeply touching plot about impostor syndrome and the pressures of being labeled a talented artist. It has a huge number of accessibility features, co-op mode, an amazing ost, difficulty settings, runs like butter, and is all in all a super polished game. IMO this was GOTY shit and I don’t know why it didn’t take off.

notThrowingAway 3y ago

>Forager This is offtopic but the forager lead dev is often criticized for claiming to be a solo dev and taking credit for other people who worked on the game. https://indiecator.org/2021/04/14/forager-the-rise-and-fall https://indiecator.org/2021/04/14/forager-the-rise-and-fall

ZephyrBlu 3y ago

> Make a game where people, with no connection or bias for you, will organically recommend it - and you're going to succeed I.e. "make a fun game that has organic viral growth" As if developers don't want to do that. You have not provided any information of value here. Organic viral growth is extremely rare, and "fun" is a useless descriptor for someone trying to replicate "fun" in their own game. Why would developers want to make a game that isn't fun? "build it and they will come" is almost always a lie, and the times it's not (I.e. organic viral growth) are not replicable. If you're making something you have to solve for distribution. Just making the thing isn't enough for it to succeed.

_gabe_ 3y ago
> Why would developers want to make a game that isn't fun? Of course nobody wants to make a game that isn't fun. But I know just how easy it is to get caught up into the "hustle" mentality where all you're focused on is getting the features complete. Once you're in this mindset, it becomes very easy to realize that your own game isn't even fun to you. This simple reminder is huge, should be repeated often, and is great advice. Make a game that you would enjoy playing for hours on end, and you'll likely gather an audience of people that also enjoy it. It really is amazing at how easy it is to forget this and end up building a game that even you, the creator, don't enjoy playing very much. Likewise, it's very easy to focus on small slices of gameplay and ignore the cohesiveness of the entire game. If different mechanics are super fun, but aren't fun together, you will have created a game that isn't fun.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  I've seen enough games I have enjoyed for hours that remain a small (talking triple digits, at best) undiscovered niche to know that this is simply no longer true. Maybe it was true in 2016 when this article is posted, but not anymore. Many games aren't fun, but many games are fun enough or are marketed well enough. You won't stand a chance without going above and beyond in one of the two executions.
Hermitian909 3y ago
> Why would developers want to make a game that isn't fun? I mean, why do people want to write buggy software? It's not on purpose, they're just not good enough to deliver quality in a timely fashion. My experience with most indie games cannot deliver on a core gameplay loop that's satisfying, even when that loop is not the draw of the game in which case I'd expect them to ape something competent. IMO an example of a studio that doesn't mess this up is Giant Games. I've liked some titles more or less but the core gameplay loop has always been competently designed.

MattRix 3y ago

As someone who has been working as an indie game dev for the past 13 years, I think you’ve got a pretty unrealistic view of the situation. You can’t just make a “good game” anymore. The tastes of the market get more demanding over time. To put it another way, the bar for what constitutes a “good game” gets more and more difficult every year. There are successful games from a few years ago that would not get any sales if released today.

maribi 3y ago
[dead]
andsoitis 3y ago
> The tastes of the market get more demanding over time. That seems to me to be true of most (every) industries / areas of human endeavor?
- MattRix 3y ago
  It probably is, but because games are such a new medium, the rate it’s advancing (not just in terms of tech, but also in design and audience expectations) is quite rapid. It means if you work on a single game for a few years, by the time you release it the demands of the market may have changed dramatically.
  - toyg 3y ago
    But do they really? It's not the '80s/'90s, genres are somewhat fossilized by now. Some things do change, but they tend to be refinements of well-established concepts. In fact, I'd argue that, having managed to kill the assumption that "newer game == more lifelike graphics" (possibly still valid for AAA, but only there), has dramatically lowered audience expectations in recent years.
    - MattRix 3y ago
      Tech is only a small part of what I’m talking about. I mean more that the standards have risen significantly as far as the quality of art style and polish, and the sophistication of gameplay and metagame depth.

rcxdude 3y ago

I think games like that, where it's a small team and they grow to great success from essentially just word of mouth, are very much lightning in a bottle. It's not just a case of good game design, it's the right kind of game for the time, and well as a fair amount of luck that the snowball starts rolling at the start. It is true that the conditions have more or less never been better for it to happen (arguably it was easier before the market was as saturated as it is now), it's just very rare for it to happen to any given game, even with good execution.

dbspin 3y ago

You're describing survivorship bias. It's impossible for you to know about the great games that you haven't heard about. I'd suggest listening to the devs on this one. I can attest that 'the cream rises to the top' isn't remotely true in areas I know more about - short stories, movies, music. There is indeed lots of cream (in addition to lots more crap with money behind it) at the top. there's also lots of cream, vast gallons to stretch the metaphor, sinking always. Especially now perhaps, in our era of vastly greater content production and a well established arms race of advertising and marketing.

karpierz 3y ago
Can you point to some great movies that didn't see any success this year?
strken 3y ago
Which great games are pulling less than 1k steam sales? Or have just a handful of reviews? I've found some games I like with very low review count, but they're all clunky and whimsical, or extremely short, or can't be played without pestering the people you live with, or shoot themselves in the foot in other ways. At some point the needle to hay ratio becomes untenable and searching the whole haystack is no longer possible for a single person. You can still randomly sample the stack, though, and rely on the opinions of others to find what you personally missed, and good games with mass appeal do tend to rise a little bit from random players stumbling across them; maybe not to blockbuster status or even profitability, but enough that a game with a marketing budget should get more than 21 Steam reviews if it's genuinely appealing. There's really not a lot of cream at the very bottom.
somenameforme 3y ago
Why are 'you' (in the general sense, you're far from the only one doing this) implying this is an incomplete information game? Steam has absolutely excellent tools for content discovery, and the vast majority of people use them actively. And due to the effectively perpetual nature not only of Steam, but also even of console stores now a days - there really is no 'survivorship.' There are games released [literally] 30 years ago now being discovered by new users, and making new sales. And that isn't just some sort of academic point I'm making. Seemingly the overwhelming majority of indie success stories are achieving long-tail success now a days. Increasing numbers of indie games released like a decade ago are having better play figures today than they did at launch. This includes both the extremely well known titles like Terraria [1], as well as those that are still relatively unknown like Kenshi [2]. [1] - https://steamcharts.com/app/105600 https://steamcharts.com/app/105600 [2] - https://steamcharts.com/app/233860 https://steamcharts.com/app/233860

passwordsarehar 3y ago

It is objectively a good game yes, but you're glossing over how it also released with _extremely fortuitous_ timing for the type of game it is: a casual small-group-multiplayer survival exploration builder that leans more toward a lighthearted experience as opposed to the sweaty/hardcore experience which is/was the norm for these types of games. Valheim dropped early 2021, just into the 2nd year of real COVID measures including lockdowns and an overall social atmosphere of "stay hunkered down at home and don't go anywhere". It was absolutely perfect timing, and I am 100% convinced it would not have done _nearly_ as well if it released 1 year earlier or 1 year later. It's hard to make a shitty game successful without a AAA marketing budget sure, but it's also hard to make a good game successful without either a AAA marketing budget, or great luck/timing.