How Coding & Farming Sim Reached 39,000% Revenue Growth After Full Release

The release of The Farmer Was Replaced, a sim that combines programming and farming, developed by Timon Herzog and published by Metaroot, saw a significant surge in revenue following its official Steam launch.

As reported by GameDiscoverCo., the revenue increase amounted to 39,000% between the first 30 days of Early Access in February 2023, which brought the developers around $4,000, and the first 30 days of the full Steam release starting in October 2025, with the revenue of approximately $1.65 million. And it continues to rise. In terms of Steam copies, The Farmer Was Replaced has sold over 400,000 lifetime Steam units after the full release. As for the territories, 21% of the game's units sold were in the U.S., followed by 12% in China and 8% in Germany.

In the game, you program a drone using a Python-like language to fully automate repetitive farming tasks and collect harvest, when your drone does the grindy, hard work for you. While the sim was in early access, it received attention from the audience organically, having an interesting concept and being an entertaining tutorial on programming. As for its skyrocketing success after the full release, Metaroot's managing director Andri Weidmann explained what the team did to improve the game's presence online.

First, they rebuilt the Steam page and presented the game's idea clearly, "focusing on the Python/programming aspect of the game, which was not really something that the old page conveyed well." Second, the creators reworked the game elements and audio to be "juicier" to make it stand out. Third, they expanded the game from English-only to 11 languages, localizing not only the in-game text but also the Steam page, screenshots, GIFs, trailer, and even the game's name in some languages to ensure accessibility for players.

Some of the measures were marketing-oriented. Thus, the team contacted nearly 10,000 influencers who had played similar games, gave out around 1,000 keys, and managed to get viral on Reddit, showcasing the strong appeal of the game's tutorial feature.

The creators also used the power of short-form video platforms, achieving more than 985,000 views on Tiktok and 1 million views on Instagram Reels. They also launched promotions on China-specific social media: before posting on RedNote, China made up only 0.3% of sales, and since the 1.0 release, it's close to 20%.

This is a story of genuine success, driven by an original concept and executed through careful presentation and marketing. Have you tried The Farmer Was Replaced? What do you think?

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