What if you didn’t have to spin the roulette wheel every time you released a new game, hoping for it to find an audience? What if there was a better way?
Like many independent developers, Falconeer and Bulwark creator Tomas Sala faces a problem: how does he get recognition for his games in an overcrowded market that prefers, paradoxically, hits?
His old answer used to be ‘to make new games and hope’. To beaver away on something for a few years and then release it, doing everything he could – crossing every finger and toe – in the hope his game would find a way to stick, and capture an audience and succeed. And he has had some success this way.
Birdy aerial combat game The Falconeer was well-timed with the release of Xbox Series S/X, such that it became an unlikely launch title, earning it a lot of exposure as well as « an inhuman amount of expectation », Sala tells me in a video call. Feedback was fierce, both positively and negatively.
The launch of chill sea-town building game Bulwark last year went more smoothly, but again Sala divided the audience. Some people told him « I’ve never played anything like this – it makes me reconnect with a how game like this could be », whereas other people said, « this makes me relearn everything; I fucking hate it », Sala reflects. Suffice to say, he didn’t enjoy the launch of either game very much.
But moreso, in the 10 years he’s been making his own games, the market has changed in dramatic ways. « I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this », Sala says, « and 2025 is mean-gaming. You’re trying to get on the viral flywheel.
« Everything ever since Balatro », he explains, « you see that viral hits, they get bigger – it’s that eternal [upwards] curve. We end up with algorithmic systems where the masses get nothing, so the thousands of games released on a day get next to nothing, then there’s a very small middle-ground and an ever-expanding top that gains more and more and more. That’s how Steam works: if your game sells, they’ll show it to more people, who will buy it so they’ll show it to more people. It’s a flywheel. Once it goes faster and faster and faster, you can go stratospheric. »
We’ve seen many examples of this in effect, with games like Escape from Duckov – a PvE single-player extraction shooter – currently enjoying hundreds of thousands of concurrent players. Duckov amassed 2 million sales in under two weeks.
