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Deep dive: how Shapez.io went from web game to $1 million Steam hit
How did web game Shapez.io end up grossing $1 million on Steam? We look at its route to success in this data heavy deep-dive.
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[The GameDiscoverCo game discovery newsletter is generally written by ‘how people find your game’ expert & GameDiscoverCo founder Simon Carless, and is a regular look at how people discover and buy video games in the 2020s.]
As you probably know, we love transparent data sharing here at GameDiscoverCo. Which is why we were very excited when Shapez.io creator Tobias Springer approached us, offering to explain how his title’s success actually happened.
The title is described on its Steam page as “a game about building factories to automate the creation and processing of increasingly complex shapes across an infinitely expanding map.” As Tobias tells us: “I really loved Factorio [but] I found it too stressful… also, I wanted to make a game which is as approachable as possible, since I found Factorio hard to get into back then.”
So yes, Shapez.io is Factorio-inspired, but with much more of an abstract and simplified graphical style, with replay hooks galore. If you’d like to understand the game better, I recommend watching this Brothgar (sponsored) YouTube playthrough:
Origin story: the free web!
But let’s concentrate on the story of how this game got started. Intriguingly, it was as a free web game, back in May 2020 - Tobias explains: “From my previous games like Yorg.io, I had a lot of experience with releasing games on the web. My marketing concept works like this:
Release a game as an .io game
Get feedback, iterate, make it better
Release it on Steam
The great thing with this is that you get a lot of free traffic when you have your game running on the web. There are numerous game portals (iogames.space, Armorgames, Kongregate