"I don't know how people found my game": Idle Pixel Fantasy by a solo developer made $4,800 in five days
On September 22, Idle Pixel Fantasy was released on Steam—a small free-to-play clicker game developed solo in a month and a half by German developer Max Ritters. According to the developer, the game turned out to be far more successful than he had anticipated.
Idle Pixel Fantasy
Ritters shared the results of Idle Pixel Fantasy in a Reddit post. Below are the figures from the first five days.
- The game's gross revenue was $4,800.
- 27,300 people played Idle Pixel Fantasy.
- 4,400 players purchased paid cosmetic DLCs.
Ritters admits that initially, he intended the clicker merely to test the free-to-play market on Steam — he had already released several paid games before. Idle Pixel Fantasy was developed in his spare time away from his main project, and he almost entirely neglected marketing: he wrote about the game a couple of times on Reddit and did nothing more for promotion. Now, the developer is working on a big content patch.
According to Ritters, one of the components of Idle Pixel Fantasy's success could be the lack of hidden costs in the game. It is monetized solely through DLCs, in the description of which the developer honestly stated that purchasing them is optional.
However, it is important to note that Idle Pixel Fantasy received a good response from Steam's own algorithms. The clicker was featured in the "Popular Free Games" ranking on the store's homepage, which ensured its visibility.