LogInA solo developer from Germany who decided to give the F2P market on Steam a try.
Steam is so full of games that most indie developers barely even dream of getting noticed without aggressive marketing and a significant amount of community growth. But sometimes surprises happen. One such surprise occurred on September 22 when Idle Pixel Fantasy, a small free-to-play clicker created in just a month and a half by German solo developer Max Ritters, was released. Max Ritters, who developed the title, shared that the game turned out to be much more successful than he expected.
Idle Pixel Fantasy, Max Ritters
The developer shared the results of Idle Pixel Fantasy in a Reddit post. In the first five days, the title generated $4.8K in gross revenue, attracted 23.3K players, and sold 4.4K DLC packs.
Ritters says the original goal with this clicker was to test the free-to-play market on Steam, as he had previously released several paid games without success. The development of Idle Pixel Fantasy was done in his spare time outside of his main project, and he devoted almost no effort to marketing. Apart from posting about the game a couple of times on Reddit, he did nothing to promote it. Now, however, following the unexpected success, the developer is working on a major content update.
"Last monday I released my little F2P game Idle Pixel Fantasy and got overwhelmed by the amount of players. As you can see, I don't have a lot of wishlists and the Steam page was live for just a month before release," wrote Ritter.
"I checked a lot of other free games, most of them have some sort of in-game microtransaction and I'm not a fan of it. So for my game I added seperated mini DLCs that you can see directly on the Steam page and I always made clear that they are completely optional and not needed, but a nice way to support me as developer. Seems the people liked my honesty and that I don't have any hidden costs."
Ritters believes one reason for the game’s success may be the lack of hidden costs. It is monetized only through DLC, which are clearly marked in their descriptions as non-essential purchases.
It’s also important to note that Steam’s own algorithms positively picked up Idle Pixel Fantasy. The clicker appeared in the Popular Free Games category on the store’s front page, providing it with the necessary visibility, which later resulted in revenue from DLCs.
Idle Pixel Fantasy, Max Ritters
"This game was a little side project that I worked on for just 1.5 months, but now Im preparing a big update because the players ask for more," continued the developer.
"Maybe I should also say that this is my 7th released game on Steam, it seems sometimes you just have to keep going. We all can do it!"
You can find the game here and the Reddit post here. Please don't forget to support indie developers whenever you can, even if it's just 50 cents.
Also, please join our 80 Level Talent platform and our Discord server, follow us on Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Telegram, TikTok, and Threads, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.