Staying Lean: How We Built the World's Biggest Social Deduction Game

When COVID shut down our escape-room business, I didn't try to scale up. I stayed small. Five years later, that still looks like the right call. When the location-based entertainment industry went dark overnight, most founders I knew started looking for a lifeline. I went looking for a gap instead.

My co-founders and I didn't come from games. We came from escape rooms and physical, in-person experiences. When that whole industry shut down in early 2020, we had to move fast or fold. So we looked at what people were suddenly trying to do online, and where it was breaking.

What we saw was a real problem. People who had never thought of themselves as gamers were trying to play with friends, and the tools weren't built for them. If you wanted a game of Among Us with your group, you had to download Discord, manage the lobby, fight off hackers, and invent your own rules for everything the game didn't handle. I had spent years around tabletop communities in China and Canada, so I knew what social play was supposed to feel like, and this wasn't it.

So we set out to solve it. That meant building in the voice chat, the player networking, and everything else, so the whole thing just worked. You didn't need to download anything. You didn't need to call a friend to figure out how to connect.

That was the founding idea for Gaggle Studios. We became the small Toronto team behind what grew into the world's largest social deduction game. None of it was a grand plan; it was a gap and a deadline.

The Cultural Insight That Sharpened Everything

The piece that focused us was cultural. In many Asian markets, social deduction games like Werewolf and Liar's Dice aren't niche hobbies; they're closer to what Monopoly or charades are in North America. They're simply what you play when friends get together: a game built around bluffing and reading the room was always going to travel well there.

When we paired that insight with a decision to make the game free, something happened that we hadn't fully planned for. Whole communities came over at once.

Free is a Philosophy, Not a Tactic

Making the game free wasn't really a pricing trick; it was a statement about what the game was for.

In social games, one person who doesn't want to pay can pull the whole group down. I had seen the same thing in escape rooms. If one person in your party thinks the ticket isn't worth it, you lose the entire booking. Going to zero removed that friction completely: downloads spread, and the communities followed them.

But "free" came with a rule attached. We committed early to never locking content behind a paywall. New maps, new characters, and new modes are available to every player. The only thing we sell is cosmetics, which are really just ways for people to express themselves inside the friend groups they're already building.

That goodwill turns out to be worth real money. Players who feel the game treats them fairly stick around longer, and when something genuinely cool shows up in the store, they buy it without being pushed.

We also stay away from the model that much of free-to-play leans on, where a handful of huge spenders carry the economics and everyone else rides along for free. We would rather have a healthy base of players who each spend a little than have 100 people holding up the entire game, because relying on the whales felt too risky to us.

Community is the product 

Five years in, we keep relearning the same lesson. What brings players back isn't new content. It's their friends.

The game started as a social deduction experience, but it turned into something closer to a shared space. Friend groups come back to it. New connections form across languages and borders. The game is more of a meeting place than a destination. It reminds me of how people talk about early World of Warcraft. The raids mattered, but what stuck with you were the people you ran them with.

Here is something that surprised us. We push out as many as 50 content updates a year, including new roles, maps, and interactions. We used to assume those updates were what brought lapsed players back.

They matter less than we thought. What actually decides whether someone returns is whether their friend group is still around. The game is the excuse. The community is the reason.

You can't manufacture that with ad spend, and we didn't try. Instead, we seeded it by working with small, community-focused Twitch streamers, the kind with a few hundred followers rather than tens of thousands. At that size, converting the whole room is realistic, and the enthusiasm is genuine rather than bought.

Staying small on purpose 

At one point, a well-funded investor was ready to write us an eight-figure check. I walked away from it.

There is a massive gap between running an indie studio and running a corporate enterprise. You have to ask whether that's really what you want in your company's DNA, and whether you're willing to rewrite how you work to get there. We decided we weren't.

So we stayed lean. Today, we're around 30 people, and with AI tools speeding up production, we can move on a new idea in days. We don't need board meetings to change direction. There's no sunk-cost pressure forcing a bad idea to keep going.

I think that kind of agility matters more right now than size. The tools for making games have gotten cheaper and widely available, and AI has sped everything up. A focused team of 30 skilled generalists, people who are great at one thing and capable at everything else, can compete with studios ten times their size. The ones who will struggle are locked into AAA cost structures with no room to turn.

Market outlook

I'll be honest about the state of distribution in 2026. Roughly 18,000 games come out on Steam every year, and the way games get discovered rewards momentum more than quality. That means money and social-media manipulation often matter more than whether the game is actually good.

Here's my prediction: The platform either filters itself or it chokes.

For developers who make it through that filter, I see a real opportunity in the space that opened up once the tools were easier to use. The edge now isn't being able to build, because almost anyone can build. The edge is being able to come up with the idea.

I think the value of strong IP will climb, and familiar IP will be worth more than a brand-new game. The sweet spot is a novel idea applied to mechanics that people already understand. 

That's where the low-hanging fruit is for indies. I point to Balatro as the model. Take something everyone knows, like poker, drop it into a structure gamers recognize, like a roguelike card game. You get something that feels instantly familiar but plays like nothing else.

If I had to give one piece of advice to any developer right now, it would be to resist two temptations. Don't scale too fast, and don't pay for excitement.

The reason is structural: Gaming influencers aren't like food bloggers, and your viewers can see the gameplay with their own eyes. If the excitement on screen doesn't match the game, they'll know.

The throughline is restraint

When I look back at the last five years, the thread running through it all is restraint: Stay lean, give more than you take, build for the whole group, not just the few big spenders, and let the community do the work that marketing can't. Five years in, we're still standing, and still small on purpose.

Shawn Fischtein is co-founder and CEO of Gaggle Studios. He shared these lessons with Kirill Tokarev of Xsolla Game Biz Institute. At Xsolla, we work behind the scenes so studios like Gaggle can stay focused on making something worth a player's time. To explore All The Things your game needs to grow, monetize, and reach players wherever they are, visit Xsolla.com.

Interviews, copywriting, editing, and article publication prepared by Kirill Tokarev, Lisa Sirlin-Hall, Viktoria Steshina, and David Jagneaux.