How 'The Farmer Was Replaced' hit 39,000% (!) revenue increase at Steam 1.0

Publikováno: 28.10.2025

Also: some other GDCo appearances - and lots of discovery/platform news.

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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.]

It’s Halloween week! Hope you’re all ready for this near-ubiquitous holiday, where we dress up as alter egos and make-believe threaten our neighbors, in exchange for candy. (Or at my house, in exchange for spooky packs of Pokemon cards. And no, pack ripping obsessives, scalpers and Gengar Holo fans, you can’t camp out here.)

Before we start, all hail Ghost Ship Games for bringing in power/folk metal band Wind Rose - which released a Deep Rock Galactic-inspired song last year - to present an acoustic ‘Tiny Dwarf Concert’ at Ghost Ship’s offices. (It’s like a Tiny Desk Concert, but with 1000% more beards, pickaxes, and reluctant programmer call-and-response?)

[WANT MARKET CONTEXT? Companies, get much more ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data SaaS access org-wide via GameDiscoverCo Pro, as 80+ have. And signing up to GDCo Plus gets (like Pro) the rest of this newsletter and Discord access, plus ‘just’ basic data & more. ]

Game discovery news: ARC Raiders comin’ in hot…

Starting out with game platform & discovery news goodness, as we do in every newsletter, here’s what we spotted:

The Farmer Was Replaced: how much of a Steam 1.0 boost?

OK, so you know when we did that story about Tainted Grail recently and said that games that start Steam Early Access slow and have a big ‘1.0 pop’ are rare? Hilariously, we found an even bigger ‘Early Access to 1.0’ outlier - ‘drone farming x programming’ game The Farmer Was Replaced($10).

How big? Our external GDCo estimates won’t be perfect, but we have it at a 39,000% revenue increase (!) between the first 30 days of Early Access in Feb. 2023 (~$4,000) - and the first 30 days of Steam 1.0 starting in Oct. 2025 (~$1.65m, still going up). This is the biggest 1.0 jump of 2025 by far…

So we sat down with Metaroot’s managing director Andri Weidmann, who picked up publishing on the Timon Herzog-created game with his small, family-owned micropublisher in mid-2025, after meeting Timon at a local Swiss Game Hub event. Let’s start with some Steam LTD, post-1.0 overview stats:

Regarding territories, 21% of the game’s units sold so far were in the U.S., followed by 12% in China, 8% in Germany, 7% in Japan, 7% in the Russian Federation, 7% in Brazil, 4% in the UK, 3% in Canada, and 2% in South Korea and France. (A diverse country split, but not that surprising?)

So, some impressive numbers here - >400k units and still scaling up! (Though it’s important to note that The Farmer Was Replaced actually had sold ~140k copies by mid-2025 after a very slow EA start, due to some unexpected post-launch organic virality during Early Access.)

Let’s talk about the game itself, though, since it’s the concept/execution that provides the virality, and marketing that takes it over the top. Here’s why it became so hot:

  • It’s got a strong ‘hook’ - automated drone farming: the idea that you can press a button to plant and harvest crops is a really strong conceptual and visual one, although the game wasn’t spotted until streamers found it and highlighted it.

  • The ‘code learning environment’ idea is imposing, but interesting: The other hook?The Farmer Was Replaced uses a version of Python, and you need to learn to code the automation steps yourself. And if you mess up the code, your drone goes haywire! This isn’t a simple game, in other words - but it’s a pretty unique one…

  • The challenge inherent in the game actually endeared it to influencers: Andri told us: “For over a year, the game had modest sales and limited visibility. Things only picked up in mid-2024, when several larger YouTubers, like CallMeKevin, Real Civil Engineer, or Olexa, started covering the game independently.”

And if you check out CallMeKevin’s video, ‘I learned how to code just to beat this game’, you can see why it’s attractive. The game is cleverly layered as a tutorial for non expert programmers. But it’s still adjacent to other optimize-y games - as this Steam reviewer says: “It really scratches the same itch as games like Shapez and Opus Magnum.”

And indeed, if you look at the games with >$1m in gross Steam revenue that The Farmer Was Replaced players have played lots more than the average Steam player (Affinity multiplier, via our GameDiscoverCo Pro data), you’ll see plenty of these games:

We’ve talked about a few of these, like strategy-incremental game (the) Gnorp Apologue, and we see other signature Zachtronics code-adjacent (Exapunks) and factory build & optimize titles (Shapez 2) on the list too. It’s a super interesting niche - maybe not a giant $50m upside, but lack of competition, and decent $ over time?

Anyhow, that’s why The Farmer Was Replaced eventually got organic interest, almost accidentally. Andri notes it reached those 140k EA sales “without any discounts, translations, or visibility through Steam events.” Yep, no discounts - just price increases (it originally launched at $5, and went to $7 in Jan. 2024 and $10 just before 1.0.)

But 1.0 was where it could really go places! So here’s what Andri and team did to really juice the title for its full release:

  • Improved Steam presence to play up the code optimize-y elements: they noted: “we completely rebuilt the Steam store page from the ground up. We focused on the Python / programming aspect of the game, which was not really something that the old page conveyed well.”

  • Reworking game elements and audio to be ‘juicier’:the title was already hot, but: “Together with our game designer, Timon reworked some parts of the game… since it’s a typical ‘number goes up’ title, we suggested [the effects] around this should be juicier. Also we hired someone to rework the whole sound.”

  • Going from English-only to 11 languages, incl. Steam page and in-game: and the Metaroot folks went the extra mile: “We localized the [Steam page] screenshots, the GIFs and even the trailer - and in some languages, the game’s name.” Since it’s a complex coding game, you want to feel like it’ll be easy for you to understand.

This is as complex as it gets - be afraid!

And then there’s the marketing, of course. We’re running out of space, but the Metaroot folks did a lot of authentic, relevant marketing. Specifically:

So: ‘going international’ at 1.0 launch and discounting at the same time to hit all those latent wishlists was huge. The game peaked at 7,400 CCU on Steam! (Things weren’t perfect, of course. There was a launch bug with the in-game documentation in Chinese and Japanese that led to some brief review bombs. But overall.. big win.)

And one funny thing: Andri provided us separate ‘before 1.0’ and ‘after 1.0’ screenshots of the game’s units sales, and it looked like the English-language organic boost in 2024 was big, as was 1.0 launch. But the scale between the two pics was radically different. So when we asked for a combined graph, we got this lopsided effort:

Yep, even those big streamer pickups in mid-2024 were ‘tiny’ vs. a ‘discounted for the first time, properly marketed’ multi-language Steam 1.0 release. So this is a great example of ‘awesome game, would have done good at 1.0, yet did outstandingly because of a well-planned 1.0 campaign’. (And people say publishers don’t matter…)

Elsewhere: Post Games podcast, TWIV feature…

Before we end, a couple of shout-outs to media GDCo has appeared in over the past couple of weeks. Firstly, I (Simon) made a rare non-text appearance being interviewed by Chris Plante for his excellent Post Games podcast. (You might know Chris from co-founding Polygon and being on The Besties podcast with the McElroys?)

Please listen to the whole thing, which is a higher-level discussion of what we do & why games do - or don’t - sell. But roughly converting some of the audio waveforms back to text again, here’s a couple of highlights from my comments:

  • Game discovery has an ‘instant’ smell test: “For me, a lot of game discoverability is - if you see a video of a game for, say, 5-8 seconds, are you immediately attracted to it, or do you not know what it is, or [what]? Is this a game where people will ‘light up’ when they see it?”

  • You can pick up on trends before they become subgenres:“Games that start off a microgenre like Vampire Survivors did… sometimes [devs] are slow to understand that. And that’s interesting, because there’s quite a lot of opportunity, if you understand that you could be riffing on this good idea, rather than just going out and doing something traditional like a 2D puzzle platformer.”

  • Why portfolio planning & management is underutilized: “I’m trying to move everyone’s decision-making process earlier in the [dev] cycle… there’s a lot of money spent later in the cycle on marketing and PR [when it’s trickier to move the needle], but there’s not enough methodical scouting of games earlier in the process.”

In addition, my latest monthly column for SkillUp & Edmond Tran’s This Week In Videogames website, ‘Why has PC become the dominant new game discovery platform?’ is free until the end of October, if you’d like to check it out.

Again, it’s aimed at a broader audience - but feel free to peruse anyhow. Conclusion: “The PC game market is just more dynamic, supports different price points and business models more easily, and has a lower barrier to entry.” Makes sense - toodles…

[We’re GameDiscoverCo, an analysis firm 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 real-time data services for publishers, funds, and other smart game industry folks.]

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