"We are seeing more and more new projects in the cozy segment," Alexander Blintsov on the results of 2025

We continue to wrap up the year 2025 with gaming teams. This time, we spoke with Alexander Blintsov, the creator of Furnish Master.

How was the year 2025 for your team? What were you able to achieve, what are you proud of, and what, on the contrary, did you not manage to do?

Alexander Blintsov, Furnish Master: Overall, 2025 was slightly worse than 2024 in terms of game metrics. Sales have been slowly tapering off, and discounts aren’t yielding the same numbers as the previous year. On the positive side, we managed to slightly reduce the number of returns thanks to consistent updates and bug fixes that were noted by players. Generally, we strive to listen to what our community has to say, but we can't always implement everything, either due to time constraints or other reasons. This year we didn't manage to release several critical features we had planned.

Nevertheless, we believe that the game became higher in quality in 2025, and people started to regard it more favorably. Perhaps this is due to our adherence to an update schedule, and players see that our early access is not an abandoned project.

What conclusions have you drawn as a development studio by the end of 2025?

Alexander: Overall, we haven't made any significant conclusions except for minor ones, such as approaches to specific technical tasks. 2025 was relatively calm for us and served as a transitional year where we primarily focused on updates, managed metrics, and observed the PC market, gathering data for future projects and preparing for the release of our current project, Furnish Master.

Have there been any changes in your interactions with publishers/investors? Has it become easier or harder to work with them?

Alexander: We don’t work with investors or publishers for our PC projects. We have a publisher for a mobile project, but interactions with them have not changed.

However, I've heard that finding investors and publishers has become significantly more challenging in the mobile market, which we will be testing with our new prototypes in 2026. On the PC market, the situation with publishers has shifted more toward facilitating indie games. I've noticed that more publishers are looking for games and are willing to invest relatively small amounts (up to $200,000) in promising projects, whereas securing larger sums has become harder. I think this might indicate that publishers and investors are gradually shifting toward the indie segment, where margins can be higher and risks lower, even though the absolute revenue might be lower. But I can't support this with any specific data; it's just my observation of the market and different community cases.

How was the year for the niche/genre you work in?

Alexander: I believe 2025 was excellent for our niche (cozy games). We're seeing more new projects in this segment that are showing outstanding results. There have even been quite a few games very similar to Furnish Master, some of which have even surpassed our game's metrics, according to public data.

What strengthening or emergence of trends in your niche/genre do you expect in 2026?

Alexander: I think the trend in cozy games will continue into 2026, and the niche will only grow stronger.

Additionally, many people are saying that 2026 will feature a lot of cooperative games focused on multiplayer, streamers, and replayability. There is even a new term in the developer community, "friend's loop," which many predict will succeed as a genre in 2026.

What are the team's plans for 2026?

Alexander: For our current project, we plan to continue releasing updates and aim to move closer to the game's final release this year by launching a major marketing campaign to attract new players and boost launch day metrics and organic reach. However, we still have many pending tasks that might take a significant amount of time, so the release could be pushed to 2027.

We are also slowly planning our next project in the strategy genre, but everything is currently at the stage of designing the game mechanics, technical elements, and marketing plan. Due to our workload with other projects, I don't think our new project will be fully announced in 2026. At most, we expect to conduct marketing tests to gauge the project's viability.