The great filter of indie game development

Wishlist Rundown - Week 40, 2025

Good morning.

This week I examine a seven-year development timeline, how artistic uniqueness and commercialization conflict, and why a game’s name affects marketability.

Let’s get into it…

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Crossing the great filter of indie game development

Nukefist, the two person team behind the upcoming Kingdom Hearts-inspired hack & slash, Genokids (releasing October 2nd with 55K est. wishlists), are nothing if not persistent. Their press release details that they started development in 2018/19. A year and a half later they launched a kickstarter campaign that ultimately failed to reach its goal of $35K. They continued to work on the game while contributing to a “fantasy adventure about an aspiring witch” called Mika and The Witch’s Mountain, which was co-developed with Chibig, the team behind Summer in Mara, and was released earlier this year with an estimated gross revenue of $385K. Nukefist then ran an entirely new Kickstarter campaign for Genokids in April 2023 to fund the completion of the game with their goal set again at $35K. This campaign exceeded their expectations bringing in $100K with over 1,500 backers. The additional funds allowed them to reach all of their stretch goals including adding voice acting and a Nintendo Switch version.

If Genokids performs well on Steam, it’ll be a storybook ending to a classically indie tale. Two friends follow their dreams and make the game they always wanted to against all odds. But this approach doesn’t typically turn out so well for most indies. As I covered in Six months or bust, long development timelines are incredibly risky. As your timeline grows, so do your costs. With more time comes increased pressure for outsized returns. And most games just don’t make enough money to cover 7 years of costs, even with Kickstarter funds in the bank. Between 2020 and 2023 only 50% of games released on Steam surpassed $500 in estimated gross revenue. In 2024, just 32% grossed over $500. As new indie developers continue to enter the market, I suspect that number will continue to shrink.

Spending 7 years working on one game sounds like an absolute nightmare to me. But maybe it’s a magic number of sorts. The 7 year threshold could be akin to The Great Filter, the hypothesized bottleneck in astrophysics that few civilizations clear before becoming spacefaring, and the explanation for why we haven’t come into contact with other intelligent life. Few can pass through The Great Filter.

There must be something driving Nukefist’s persistence. I would suspect it’s a deep appreciation for the hack & slash genre. But deep appreciation can only motivate you for so long. Not even indie darling Eric Barone spent 7 years working on his passion project turned megahit Stardew Valley. Ask the average indie developer why they make the games they do and they’re most likely to respond with one of the following: “I just want to make the game I would want to play” or “I couldn’t find the game I wanted, so I had to make it myself” or “I love game X and game Y, and wanted to see what would happen if you combine them”.

A recent YouTube video uploaded by Nukefist highlights that they fall into a couple of these camps, it’s titled: “No new Kingdom Hearts game in years so I made my own.” This video was just 48 seconds of gameplay and reached 64K views. The top comment reads:

So we’re combining KH [Kingdom Hearts] and DMC [Devil May Cry]? I absolutely get it. It’s a working formula. And I’m all here for it.

As I discussed in last week’s post about the slot machine roguelite CloverPit, it can sometimes be a winning strategy to be unabashedly direct about your influences. This works especially well if you nail the combination. It’s got to be clear and obvious.