How Rusty's Retirement idle-farmed its way to 300k+ Steam sales!

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[The GameDiscoverCo game discovery newsletter is written by ‘how people find your game’ expert & company founder Simon Carless, and is a regular look at how people discover and buy video games in the 2020s.]

Well, we’re back from Gamescom - thanks to all we ran into there. And we’re here to kick off Year 5 of the newsletter. If we keep doing this long enough, will Xbox give us a custom 1000-point Xbox achievement, like they did for Bethesda’s Todd Howard?

A reminder before you get started: only one GameDiscoverCo newsletter per week (this one!) is free. You need to upgrade to GDCo Plus to get the others, and our 25% off deal on that ain’t gonna last for ever. So step on up - if you didn’t - and get more newsletters, hot Steam ‘Hype’ & estimate data & lots more. (Yer missing out, Harry.)

How Rusty's Retirement idle-farmed to 300k sold!

As always, we’re checking our estimates of top-selling Steam games, so we can capture the devs, politely interrogate them, and tell you how they did it. And we were delighted to see the $7 ‘idle-farming simulator’Rusty’s Retirement high in our charts.

It’s managed to sell almost 330,000 copies on Steam since late April, wow. What’s more, we’ve previously covered the game’s solo dev, Jordan Morris, since his last title, the Metroidvania-ish Haiku The Robot, also did well. (But not this well!)

So we got back in contact with Jordan. And he was kind enough to give us a whole bunch of granular data and insight on the game, starting with this Steam overview:

Always fascinating to see real numbers. The revenue ends up being about $5 per unit, due to a) expected refunds b) discounts at launch and during two sale periods c) because of country split, which we’ll get to in a second.

You’ll also see ‘DLC’ of 36,000 units, about an 11% attach rate. That’s simply a Supporter Pack, a $4 golden outfit for Rusty to show your appreciation. And as Jordan says: “$111k is a very welcomed [revenue] addition for simply adding a special supporter skin.”

Ah yes, and when it comes to country split, here it is. The Asian split for this game - 26% China, 10% Japan, 6% Korea, 4% Taiwan - was a bit higher than we would have guessed ahead of seeing the numbers, which is intriguing:

Finally, we get a chance to see daily units sold. This game started out SUPER hot - averaging 20k sold in each of the first 5 days. Jordan explains: “I planned the release around the Steam-organized Farming Fest on April 29th, and I launched Rusty on the Friday before, April 26th. The game built up a lot of momentum over that weekend, and then exploded again during the farming event.” And here’s the evidence:

You can spot the ‘double peak’ near launch due to that Farming Fest promotion. (BTW, another example of a game using a themed Steam festival to surge interest was Jump Ship on the wishlist side of things - it’s a thing.)

The other sales bumps since release are due to discounting enough (20% for the Summer sale and 25% for the subsequent one!) to trigger wishlist emails, something you can see clearly on Rusty’s Retirement’s wishlist conversion chart:

Overall, Jordan says: “Sales have slowed down a lot in comparison, but $1,800 a day (4 months post launch) [~300 units a day, when no promotion is taking place] is still an insane amount of money for someone of my size/capabilities.”

So far, so good. But the million dollar question, as always, is ‘why was this game popular?’ There’s plenty of idle and farming games out there, right? Well, here’s the deal:

• The hook? You can play a game while in a window while you do other things: the key differentiator for Rusty’s Retirement is very clever - it’s “designed to sit at the bottom of your screen, allowing you to work on other tasks while caring for your farm!” The screenshots (below) show the odd, almost ‘90s effect of this concept.

• Rusty’s Retirement is designed to be fun for all levels of concentration: Jordan explained: “I don't have much time to play games anymore. I like to play idle games [like (the) Gnorp Apologue] casually on the side, since they don't require my immediate attention. Nothing bad happens if I have other things to attend to - I can come back and still make progress.”

• The final game has surprising depth - if you want to explore it: as he notes: “I managed to simplify [core game actions] down to two main actions: planting seeds, and placing… things which automate the farming process.” But he adds: “I wanted to cater to both the casual farming sim player and the strategic idler fan who wants to min/max everything.” So you can nerd out over details, or just noodle with it - up to you.

BTW, Rusty’s Retirement was originally made as a 2-week prototype after Jordan was unwinding from shipping Haiku The Robot. He almost got sucked into making another Metroidvania, but luckily realized that this ‘Idle Valley’ concept was sellable.

We’ve noticed a few interesting trends in this ‘a game, but not’ space - for example, successful ‘ambient study aids’ like Spirit City: Lo-Fi Sessions. The point is: people love the idea of a game/app that demands as much from them as they are willing to give.

But pricing was key here. Jordan says he picked the price “based on the median/average prices of Idler games ($0-$5) and Farming Sims ($10-$15).” Since the game “has more content than a regular idler, but not enough to be a fully fledged farming sim”, he decided on $7.

That’s all well and good, but how did people find the game before release? It seems like the ‘takes up the bottom third of your screen’ hook really beguiled people - here’s streamer Pirate Software rhapsodizing about it, for example.

Jordan notes: “I had a lot of success posting about the game on Twitter and Instagram Reels (which I then used to cross promote on TikTok). I think the idea really stuck with people.” He also added a feature where Twitch viewers could spawn on the farm and help out.

It looks like Twitch really helped out launch interest, but hilariously, because of the multitasking angle and the game not being full-screen, “most streams were categorized with "Just Chatting" vs. "Rusty's Retirement"“, so it was very difficult to track. (What a funny problem to have.)

So that’s the formula here: ‘really clever gimmick x super cute diorama-ish art x low-stress, well designed interactivity x low-cost game/app’ = a game-ish thing that players were drawn to in their hundreds of thousands. Predictable? No. Satisfying? Oh yes.

Which titles from Gamescom ‘popped’ the most?

You may recall we recently launched a ‘follower velocity’ view for unreleased Steam games in GDCO’s Plus subscriber-exclusive data back-end. And so we thought we’d check it now, the week after Gamescom, to see what new (and older!) unreleased games are currently trending.

We recently fixed an issue with this chart, so you can see ‘new on Steam’ games. We’ll probably add an extra ‘new’ label too. But if total Steam followers are the same number as ‘followers added in the last week’, it launched its Steam page in the last 7 days!

Anyhow, a handful of these titles - such as Valve’s own (currently 90k CCU!) Deadlock - were nowhere to be seen at Gamescom. But most titles above were either announced or showcased at the event. So what surprising or notable things can we see?

• Krafton’s The Sims-style title inZOI is getting a lot of buzz: the leading life sims have a giant ‘moat’ - making competitors is incredibly complex and nuanced. What we do know of upstart inZOI is that it has a kickass character creator, and its limited free demo massively spiked interest - check out this video for more.

• Big franchise sequels announced at Gamescom got interest, duh: this includes looter-shooter redux Borderlands 4, ‘DLC turned standalone game’ follow-on Dying Light: The Beast and long-rumored prequel Mafia: The Old Country. (Pre-order announcements for Civ VII and Kingdom Come II also helped hype.)

• Top ‘original IP’ trending game - besides Deadlock & inZOI - is Reanimal: excepting 3v3 shooter Spectre Divide, which Beta-ed and is launching soon, the top ‘brand new’ IP at Gamescom is Tarsier’s creepy Reanimal, from the Little Nightmares devs. Horror - and a great track record - works, folks…

Going further down the ‘original-ish IP’ list, Saber’s road-building evolution of the Snowrunner/Mudrunner series, RoadCraft, added 6,700 followers, and Peter Molyneux’s ‘not a Fable reference, honest’ citybuilder Masters Of Albion added 5,500.

Finally, friend of the newsletter David Wehle debuted intriguing ‘horror meets farming’ game We Harvest Shadows with a demo and an Opening Night Live pre-show reveal. Streamers are digging it, and it added ~3,500 followers in pretty short order.

So that’s what we’re seeing from ‘a week after Gamescom Opening Night live’ - lots of interest for existing franchises and notable devs, but still some opportunity for less known titles to break out. (Hurray?)

The game platform & discovery news round-up…

Finishing up for today, quite a few platform and discovery things happened since late last week. And we’re here to chonk through them with you. Let’s do it:

• Steam hit another concurrency milestone at the weekend, no doubt helped by Wukong’s 2m in-game CCU: “Steam just surpassed its own CCU peak and reached 37,203,044 concurrent users (vs 36,928,521 from June, 2024). Additionally, the in-game CCU peak [across all games] was also surpassed, and reached 12,484,655 users.”

• Here’s an interesting editorial from Paul Kilduff-Taylor, ‘Saturation doesn’t exist’, in which he suggests: “When players say ‘Soulslikes are oversaturated’, I believe what they often mean is ‘I feel bored because several new third-person action games have seemed too similar to me personally’.”

• Nintendo dropped a combination Pizza Hut & Taco Bell Indie World & Nintendo Direct on us this morning (press release & video). Notable announces included stealth drops - the Wario Land-esque Pizza Tower in particular, with Yakuza Kiwami for Switch and the Tetris Forever retro collection also unveiled.

• Our Discord users spotted that Valve’s multiplayer beta of its own Deadlock uses a system where a player can directly invite other players using the Steam Playtest feature, greatly enhancing virality. (Is this feature going to be available to third-party games in the future? We hope so!)

• In 2019, Borderlands 3 was Epic Games Store exclusive on PC, with Randy Pitchford predicting Steam a ‘dying store’, long-term. But in 2025, Borderlands 4 will debut on both Steam and EGS, and Pitchford has changed his tune: “If Epic successfully pressed its advantage, that may have been the case. But Epic did not.”

• Matthew Ball’s latest looks at why Roblox doesn’t ‘make a profit’ - a lot related to accounting practices, to be honest: “Roblox notes that on average, a user uses all of their newly purchased Robux within only three days”, despite the revenue being spread over 27 months. (Lots more awesome and little-seen stats in this article.)

• Sprite-based tactical RPG Arco(above) seems to be assuming the cowl of ‘if this great game can’t sell, what can?’, with GamesRadar doing a piece discussing its lack of reach (only 150 CCU max, and the devs say “purchases translated very well into reviews in our case. But wishlists didn't transfer into sales much.”)

• Meta news: the company’s Connect conference in late September “will also include new mixed-reality headsets and smart glasses… the biggest debut will be a preview of Meta’s future augmented reality glasses”, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. (We’ll also see the cheaper Quest 3S mixed reality headset, possibly at $300-$400.)

• Anime streaming subscription service Crunchyroll - which has 15 million paid subs, btw - is grabbing more games for its ‘Crunchyroll Game Vault’ on mobile, licensing indie racer Victory Heat Rally for a mobile debut alongside its Steam one this October. (Since a logon is needed, it’s quite Netflix-y in intent, right?)

• Microlinks: Japan’s game market grew steadily in 2023, with the PC game market expanding by 25%; Apple to split its App Store division into two teams amid growing regulatory pressure in EU; the PlayStation Stars rewards system is getting partially nerfed, not that we presume most of you remember it.

Finally, did you know you can now ‘see’ which Pokemon cards you have in a pack without even opening it, thanks to a hobbyist and a CT scanner? We’re pretty sure Wilhelm Röntgen didn’t have Squirtle-related use cases back in 1895, but hey:

[We’re GameDiscoverCo, an agency based around one simple issue: how do players find, buy and enjoy your PC or console game? We run the newsletter you’re reading, and provide consulting services for publishers, funds, and other smart game industry folks.]