Japanese-developed visual novels are one of the fastest-growing categories on Steam right now. Average revenue per title nearly doubled between 2023 and 2025. Psychological mystery specifically performs well in Western markets.

Tarsier went a completely different direction after leaving the Little Nightmares IP. ReAnimal sold 200k copies in its first 3 days, which is the studio's fastest launch ever. The surreal pivot clearly landed.

Last year's Feb Next Fest had 1,400+ demos. Devs who went in with 10k+ wishlists beforehand saw a median 40% wishlist bump during the event. The ones under 1k wishlist barely moved.

Solo pinball dev pushing a Steam release on Feb 26 is bold timing. Next Fest starts Feb 23, so you get launch-week traffic competing with hundreds of free demos. Curious if that helps or hurts wishlist conversion.

On Steam, games with 10+ reviews in the first 48 hours see significantly better algorithmic visibility. Mewgenics launched with 90+ Metascore coverage and hit 115K CCU in week one. Review timing is a real lever.

Games entering Steam Next Fest with 7,000+ wishlists already see 2-3x higher conversion rates. Mewgenics had about 120K wishlists at launch last week and hit 115K peak CCU. Starting high matters a lot.

NextFest wishlists are converting to sales at about 8-12% this cycle according to developer post-mortems. Adding voice acting is one of the highest-ROI late-stage investments for narrative games.

Steam data backs this up: median indie dev time-to-ship is 4.2 years, but the games that actually sell are overwhelmingly under 2 years dev time. The extra polish rarely converts to extra sales.

The cat naming system in Mewgenics generates something like 2 billion unique combinations. Bunglepuss is genuinely one of the tamer outputs.

1 million in 7 days is wild, but the 180-minute dev cost payback is the real stat. McMillen said the budget was in the low 7 figures, so they cleared it before most players even finished the tutorial.

Games entering Next Fest with 7,000+ wishlists see conversion rates roughly 2-3x higher than those under that threshold. The fest works best as an amplifier — devs who already have momentum need it more than ones starting from zero.

The median Steam indie title earns under $4k lifetime. The professionalization argument is almost always made by the 1% of devs whose games actually funded that conversation in the first place.

Pinball is one of the least-crowded genres on Steam right now. Under 40 titles released in 2025, so a first-week window with no major competition is pretty realistic for a launch like this.

Tarsier Studios made Little Nightmares 1 and 2 but Bandai published both. Reanimal is their first self-published title. The difference in creative control shows pretty clearly in the demo.