This new Steam game made $400,000+ in 48 hours. No publisher. No paid ads. First game from a tiny indie team. Here's EXACTLY how they pulled it off (so you can steal it): 🧵🔥
The game is called “RV There Yet.” It’s literally: you and your friends in a janky old RV, trying to survive the mountains together while talking trash on proximity voice chat. That’s it. It's dumb. It's chaotic. It's perfect.
Genre matters. Right now “friendslop” games are printing money. - proximity voice chat - goofy characters - simple goal - most of the “gameplay” is you and your friends being idiots together This genre is BUILT for clips. BUILT for streamers.
They didn’t try to invent a new genre. They said: “This type of game is blowing up (like Peak / Lethal Company style). Let’s make OUR twist: road trip survival in a scuffed camper in the mountains.” Copy what works → add a twist → ship fast.
Streamers did the marketing for them. We’re talking huge creators like CaseOh playing it on day 2. No sponsor money. No deal. They just played it because it’s actually FUN and their audience loves watching chaos. Free distribution. Free hype.
Result after 2 days: - 130,000 copies sold - $400K-$500K estimated revenue From an indie team. Not Ubisoft. Not EA. A tiny studio called Nuggets Entertainment.
You think that’s crazy? Before launch it already had 300,000 wishlists. Here’s the wild part: They basically did ZERO marketing. They “accidentally” left the Steam page public… and the Steam algorithm itself made it go viral. People just FOUND IT.
Read that again: They “weren’t ready” to announce. They hadn’t tweeted. No trailer blast. Steam players discovered it anyway, started wishlisting it like crazy (67,000+ wishlists in the first days), and the algorithm did the snowball FOR THEM.
So the playbook for 2025 indie success is kinda obvious now: Pick a genre that’s ALREADY going viral with streamers Add one clean twist (RV survival road trip) Polish the hell out of vibes/characters/comedy Let Steam + Twitch/TikTok do the marketing for you
If you’re a small dev and you’re still trying to make a super serious 200-hour RPG alone… you’re fighting on hard mode. Make something your friends WANT to stream in Discord tonight. That’s the new meta. I break down games like this on YouTube + I teach Unreal Engine 5 in 800+
@GorkaGames There’s a lot more to this than what you’re saying. The compelling name and great capsule image are significant marketing efforts that paid off. It’s disingenuous to tell people turning your store page public and making friends-slop = an instant hit.
@GorkaGames it’s completely wrong calculation. try gamalytic and never use reviews multiply by x formula
@GorkaGames It's bullshit, they have a publisher and marketing partners
This is getting better and better! I'll be very happy once we can all move away from Mixamo (Adobe)
you should post more gamedev stuff 90% of gamedev:
New devs don't realize how bad youtube tutorials are. I've seen some put GetComponent(); in the Update(); function.
dev day 409: more work on the boring machine mesh. I started modeling the carving hull for the weird turbine machine. The colors seen here are the material ID colors for Substance painter. It looked so swanky with the colorID I decided to capture some footage!