Game Dev

First game made $1mil, second game $0

The games industry is very tricky, especially for indie devs. One of the benefits you have is experience which is why I always recommend you make multiple smaller games rather than one big one, because you gain more experience quickly.

However even with that experience, every game is still a separate thing, so having massive success with one game does NOT guarantee massive success on the next one.

One developer on Reddit wrote about their experience. Success with The Matriarch, failure with The Masquerade. After thinking for quite a bit they came up with 5 takeaways for why the second game failed. How it was an issue of not understanding the genre well enough and not playing to your strengths, which are definitely valid learnings. However personally I believe they are missing on the most important takeaway that I think perfectly explains what happened here. It is the same thing that affected this next example.

Another example I know of where this happened is with the developer Radiangames. The first game was Instruments of Destruction, massive hit with about $1 million in revenue. And the next game after that was Fireball 2 which made just $1,000. The developer made a very sobering video talking about that massive difference.

The reason for both these results? Based on my experience I would say it is simply marketability, exactly what I covered in a recent video. For the first example, the social deduction genre was super hot during the Covid and Among Us time, but that time has since passed and nowadays it is not really a hot or marketable genre. And for the second example, Arcade games have never been a hot genre so even if you make one that is super satisfying is is highly unlikely to do well.

My advice to you is to pick your game ideas carefully. If your goal is to find success then you NEED to ensure you work on an actual marketable idea.

Affiliate

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Game Dev

Steam Bestselling games 2025!

Steam has just published their page for the Bestselling games of 2025!

The page is sorted into Tiers by revenue. Based on looking at revenue estimates from Gamalytic it seems Platinum tier means over $100 Million, Gold above $50 Million, Silver maybe over $20 million and Bronze maybe over $5 million.

The most awesome thing this year is seeing tiny indie dev teams competing head to head with massive AAA titles. On the Platinum tier we have both Battlefield 6, (made by likely over a thousand people) and also Schedule I, made by a solo dev! Insane!

On the Gold tier we have Dispatch alongside Call of Duty: Black Ops 7. And on Silver there is PEAK alongside NBA 2K26.

Oh and also we now have the winners of the Steam Awards 2025!

Surprisingly the game of the year is NOT Expedition 33, it's actually Hollow Knight: Silksong! Definitely tough competition between all the finalists this year. Hollow Knight: Silksong also won Best Game you Suck At Award!

Better with Friends of course went to PEAK! Definitely deserved considering how much joy that game gave to so many people. Best Game on Steam Deck went to Hades II, this is a bigger market every year. Most Innovative Gameplay went to Arc Raiders! I really need to play this one to see what all the hype is about.

Best Soundtrack for Expedition 33, Outstanding Story for Dispatch, and Outstanding Visual Style for Silent Hill f.

Definitely a great year for games! Lots of awesome stuff to play, and lots of indie devs found tons of success!

Gaming

50 Most Anticipated games of 2026

With the New Year it's time to look ahead and see all the awesome stuff we get to play in the coming 12 months!

The most obvious one is of course GTAVI. This is the game the entire industry is waiting for. In case you don't know the games market has actually not grown in quite a bit, and many analysts hope that GTAVI is the thing that will kickstart everything so there's a lot riding on this game. Hopefully there will be no more delays and this November we will finally see if it matches up to 13 years of hype.

But despite that being the big standout release of the year there are definitely a ton more awesome games coming out. Everyone is currently writing articles with their top picks for the year. Polygon has a list of the top 50, Reddit users made their picks. IGN has a list, I like Jake Baldino's taste and tons more.

The common ones are 007 First Light, Control: Resonant, Marvel's Wolverine, Resident Evil: Requiem, Saros, Onimusha: Way of the Sword, Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis, Pragmata, Ace Combat 8, Ontos, etc.

And of course there will be plenty of awesome indies coming out that no one expects! That's always the best part of the industry!

Fun

Photos are actually black and white

Do you know how much processing your phone does to a photo? I didn't know!

Here is a really neat website that strips down all the processing and showcases what happens step by step.

First, did you know that sensors don't really see color? Technically all they see is brightness. Then you combine brightness from a Red sensor with a Green and Blue sensors and that's how you get actual color.

However then there's another problem, the human eye isn't linear, it sees brightness in different levels with more detail on darker parts than brighter parts. So to make your image look good you need to re-scale your brightness levels to match that. Then same thing for colors, green light sensors are more sensitive than red or blue, so that also needs to be recalibrated.

Basically it takes a lot of processing to take an image from a sensor into something you actually see. And then on top of that of course nowadays you have lots of denoising and all kinds of filtering on top of that "final" image.