The latest big indie hit is Big Walk! Selling over a million copies in just a few days, that's crazy. And this game has one very very unique thing, it is online co-op only! Meaning no singleplayer at all. If you have no friends you CANNOT play the game!

Given how every time there is a massive hit like this one it starts a trend that other games follow, will the next trend be online co-op only games?

Normally my advice is to be extremely careful with online-only games, because they have a brutal cold start problem. If nobody is playing, the game is dead on arrival. You don't just need one player to buy it, you need that player to convince friends to buy it too. If you are an unknown indie that can be an insanely difficult problem to solve.

But if it works, it can REALLY work! With these games you either make $0 or $100,000+ there's no in-between.

So the excellent newsletter GameDiscoverCo posed this question, will this become a trend? Online co-op only games without any singleplayer mode whatsoever?

Personally I would say it is way too risky for my taste. If the game was not a hit it would be literally unplayable, and for people without friends it is unplayable. (I'm not sure if the game has some sort of anonymous matchmaking)

Also personally I am not into multiplayer games nowadays, so if something is multiplayer only then no matter how interesting it is I will probably never play it, and there's definitely a sizeable audience like me.

Regardless, I am very interested in seeing if this does start a trend, in 6 months we will know if we suddenly see a lot of co-op only games coming out.

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Nowadays if you want to make it on Steam then wishlists are key, you NEED wishlists to find success.

So what does that mean if you have a game with fewer than 1,000 wishlists? Should you launch it? Delay it? Cancel it?

This is a question posed by this developer who has two upcoming games and neither has found much traction.

To that question I would pose a different question, what is the goal with the game? What is your definition of success?

If your goal is financial success, then yes, launching with fewer than 1,000 wishlists is probably going to be a flop. Although at the same time delaying will likely not save the game either (assuming the developer has already attempted some marketing and all attempts failed)

But if this is your first game, which is usually the case in these sorts of questions, then your goal should be learning and not money. Your first game likely won't make any money, AND THAT'S OKAY! My first game made me about $0.10! Your first game, or first few games, are all about learning and if the goal is learning then absolutely a launch is always a good thing because you will learn so much.

Launch with what you have. Do your best. Learn what went right, what went wrong, how your Steam page performed, how players reacted, how reviews worked, what marketing did or did not help, and then apply those lessons to the next game.

That knowledge is extremely valuable. You cannot fully learn how to release a game by just reading advice forever. At some point you need to actually ship, see reality, and improve.

So if the goal is learning, the number of wishlists does not matter, you will learn no matter what. And if the goal is money, then if you're in this situation then something already went wrong. Finding success nowadays starts BEFORE you write a single line of code, it all starts with the idea. If you have a good marketable idea then 1000 wishlists should be easily attainable, if it's not then keep trying new ideas until you find something that hits.

Minecraft has been around for ages! First launched in 2009, that was 17 years ago!

There's been so many updates in all those years, each update adding so many things in the game to the point that the game now is unrecognizable to what it was back when it first launched.

This website has a really awesome timeline of all the blocks added from the very beginning until right now starting off we just 26 blocks and ending up with over 1,000!