🦨Time flies, doesn't it? On March 11th, one year ago today, we released the game. We actually were gonna do it on March 12th, but got a little impatient and also the game was already done anyways. It's a good thing we did, too, because on the 12th someone released a bunch of stuff on Steam and we woulda been pushed right off the "new releases" page. Instead, we got several hours just to ourselves. Dunno how much that did, but yea.
In this post I'm gonna talk about what went right, what went wrong, sales numbers, and more. I'll break it up into sections so that it's easier for you to read, so let's get into it.
The Release
The release date was completely arbitrary. It was either gonna be 12/3 (international date format) or 3/21 (American date format) but the release month was not arbitrary - we definitely had to get it done by March, because we were doing very bad financially.
The release was interesting, especially since the game got a Polygon article (Shoutout to Ian Walker for recognizing us as a plural system, and addressing me as Ashe when talking to me.) Everyone loved the concept of the lesbian toggle, but it ended up being a double-edged sword. We feel like a lot of people just saw it as some kind of "gimmick" that we "had" to do to get the game "attention" or something, and assumed that maybe it wasn't a good game otherwise, so they didn't check it out. It was just a funny thing they saw online, and then they moved on.
However, the game currently sits at 182 positive reviews on Steam, with only a single negative review that's mixed at best. Meanwhile on Itch, the game currently sits with a 4.82/5 star rating from 76 ratings. To me, this means that we did a good job, and we weren't trying to hide behind "gimmicks" or whatever. People really enjoyed the game, and we really appreciate that.
Game Feedback and Difficulty
We've gotten a lot of feedback about the game, both in terms of bugs, as well as things people liked and didn't like. One of the biggest points of discussion was the difficulty, with many people saying that they found it too easy. However, for every review where they said it was too easy, we'd have 2 or 3 saying that it was really tricky and they couldn't solve all the puzzles. I think the thing some players don't realize is that they are just naturally attuned to how the game works, to the point that we posted one of the difficult puzzles once and someone said they had already solved it in their mind just by looking at it. But, this is not the case for everyone.
Our overall goal was to make an approachable puzzle game that you could beat and be happy with, where you didn't have to do all the puzzles, but where the game would challenge you if you decided to. Currently on Steam, 29.2% of players have the "Beat the game" achievement (solve the required amount of puzzles in the Crystal Caverns) while 21.7% of players have the achievement for completing every puzzle. Considering the achievement rates for other games, especially puzzle games, we feel like we struck the right balance between "approachable" and "there's sicko puzzles if you want em." Roughly 1/3rd of players at least got to world 7 (out of 8) and that's good enough for us.
Overall, people said that the difficulty scaled really well, and that it did a good job teaching you mechanics without making it obvious that it was doing so, so I feel like I did a good job directing the puzzle design and progression.
The price of the game was also a big discussion point. It's hard to gauge how long a player will spend on the game. We figured it'd take about 4-6 hours, but "How Long To Beat" says people take about 2.5-4 hours to beat it. A lot of people thought the launch price of $14.99 was fine, but a lot of people thought it should be less - and indeed, most people bought the game when it was on sale. We originally wanted to launch it at $9.99, but got talked into doing more by people who were probably just trying to look out for us. Pricing games is hard, but we don't particularly care about money as an object, so lowing the price was just fine by us.
Updates And New Features
Since we launched the game, we did a lot of updates. We made the puzzle editor a real thing players could use, rather than a hidden debug tool, and added online integration with puzzles. Some people even made some puzzles, and that was really cool to see! We also made several improvements to the menus, some visual improvements to puzzle elements to make them easier to read, and fixed a lot of bugs. People also found puzzle combinations that we apparently didn't think of.
For example, at launch it was found that if you went over a Slime Trap while in the Steel State, it would still count as if it cleared slime, allowing you to have your "tiles touched" become a negative number. The game really, really didn't like this, and would crash if you got -3 or -4 tiles touched. We still don't know why negative tiles touched breaks the game, but we fixed it. People also found other bugs and inconsistencies with puzzle logic that we fixed, and we're pretty confident in how the game runs now, with its rules being applied consistently.
One thing we really did not want to do was change any of the puzzle layouts, because we wanted to make sure if you looked up the answer on Youtube, it wouldn't change (we've played puzzle games that changed the solution since launch, it's frustrating to deal with.) Fortunately, we only had to update one puzzle, and it was just to fix a logic bug - the solution is exactly the same, we just had to move one of the laser blocks down one tile.
In addition to the improvements and new features above, we also released Blobun Mini. This was born out of a desire to see Blobun as "oh so retro," and to also code the game from the ground up in a much better and more efficient way. One thing we didn't like about Blobun was how a lot of stuff ended up being coded in an inefficient way, but with the 1.1 update, we went through and optimized everything a lot. If you tried it back in the day and it didn't run well, try the new version. You may be surprised.
(Site note: Cramming 60 new puzzles into Blobun Mini and making a comparable experience to the full game in a single pico8 cart was a lot of fun, but we'll never do something like that again, because it was also pretty stressful.)
People have asked about new content/expansions/DLC/etc, but I think the following section will clear up why that hasn't happened.
Sales Numbers
Nobody ever talks about these, but we've been pretty transparent about it. Also, since we've been back on the grind trying to get mutual aid again, we feel like it's especially important to talk about it.
First, the copies sold. At the time of writing, Blobun's sold 1420 copies on Steam, and 271 copies on itch. This brings us up to a total of 1691 copies sold, and it's kinda funny how we got all the funny numbers here. I should note, this does not include people who got Blobun in one of the bundles we've joined on Itch, and the Steam numbers don't include people who redeemed Steam keys through Itch. It's hard to get numbers on how many people actually downloaded the game through a bundle on Itch, and Itch customers who redeemed Steam keys are not new customers, so they shouldn't count twice.
Now for how much we made. Taking the amount the game made on Steam, as well as Itch (including bundles in which we made a profit, excluding bundles that went to charity that we did not make money from) and deducting platform fees, taxes, etc, we've made just over $11,700 to date. This number is not precise, but I don't think anyone would benefit from me sitting down for 3 hours to figure out the actual number. This is "close enough."
Now, I know a lot of people out there will go "wow, that's a lot of money!" However, consider that this is income over the entire year, and also, an annual income of $31,200 is considered "poverty" in California. So, when your game only gets you about 37% of the income you need to be considered impoverish, yea, the game did not solve our problems with debt and everything else at all.
(Side note: Even with support on other platforms like Patreon and Kofi, we still didn't come anywhere close to the "poverty" amount above. We get by by being incredibly frugal, but it's also really stressful.)
The money we made from Blobun's launch though did give us some time to relax and take a little bit of a break, both from working, and from asking for money online, so that was nice. However, the game was not one of those "runaway success" stories you hear about on Steam. However, it also sold copies and made some money, so we could have done a lot worse. We really appreciate everyone who bought and played the game, and shared it with their friends.
I want to point out that of the 1691 copies sold, we got 258 combined ratings from Itch and Steam. I don't know how many of those overlap between sites, but it definitely means that the players are really engaged with the game. We appreciate it.
The Future
People have been asking about various things like new content, new features, translations into other languages, ports to consoles, etc, and all I can really tell you is that that $11k is long, long gone. This stuff costs time and money, and unfortunately we don't have either to devote any more to Blobun. We took time to update and optimize it to get it in a place we didn't have time to do before release, but after that, we've considered the game done and dusted. While we would like to come back in the future and add more features, puzzle elements, etc, it's not in the cards right now. We're happy with the state it's in currently, though.
We did spend a good chunk of 2025 learning new skills and programming languages, experimenting with C#, Monogame, and Godot, as well as learning C/C++. We were working on another game, but that one didn't pan out. We've become much better at game dev though from that experience, so that's something.
Right now, we're focusing on working on a nonogram game, as well as a small scale adventure game. Both of them should be smaller scale projects, with the goal of having more games out there to try to generate more passive income with, but also because they're two types of games we've wanted to make for a long time. People keep asking "where's Shield Cat at?" but the unfortunate thing is that, we're just not making the money to focus time and effort on a game of that scale.
We have to keep it small time for now, and we have to keep moving on. As much as we loved working on Blobun, and would love to do more with it, we have to keep moving on. And, we're very confident in the projects we're working on now, so hopefully in the future, everything will work out.
The Wrap-up
Was Blobun a success or a failure? Some would consider it a failure, but from the perspective of this being our first completed game, with no publisher or marketing, relying on word of mouth, and being an obscure creator, I think we did a good job. In many ways, we accomplished what we set out to do with the game, and to us, that'll always make it a success. What anyone else has to say about it, we do not care.
I think, if you take anything away from this article, it's that all those guys who say "all you have to do is release a good game on Steam and it'll do good and make hundreds of thousands of dollars" are writing articles just to make themselves sound smart. A lot of this is just luck, and all you can do is try your best. Even if the game remains niche and obscure forever, we made a good game that we enjoyed, with the hope that a handful of other like-minded people would enjoy it too, and we got that.
For our fellow queer creators, this one's for you. Stay strong. Times are very uncertain right now, but people like us aren't going anywhere. All we can do is keep doing what we do, and bringing smiles to people's faces. Blobun made a lot of people happy, and that's something that nobody can take away.
Thanks to Roxy for helping me write and format this post nicely.