Deep dive: Inside Strange Horticulture's delightful Steam success
Simon Carless
Wednesday 23rd March 2022
The GameDiscoverCo game discovery newsletter is written by 'how people find your game' expert and GameDiscoverCo founder Simon Carless, and is a regular look at how people discover and buy video games in the 2020s.
We've recently been talking to Erik Schreuder, CEO of indie publisher Iceberg Interactive, and we're delighted to share insights and outcomes from the late January 2022 release of the Bad Viking-developed 'occult puzzle game' Strange Horticulture on Steam/PC, which has racked up almost 1,700 Overwhelmingly Positive Steam reviews since then.
The game was sitting at around 20,000 Steam wishlists at launch. But what's been really impressive is its first-week results (about 5x as good as median, according to our Plus data), and its long-term sales. It's now the 18th best performing new January 2022 title by total Steam reviews to date, which is great for such a small title.
(The game was made by two brothers based in the UK, who have been making Flash games like Bad Eggs Online for almost a decade before creating this, so have a lot of experience shipping titles.)
Erik was kind enough to share both lifetime Steam revenue to date (below), as well as talk pre-release wins and lots more in the below Q&A. Let's go:
Q: When you signed this title, what things specifically appealed to you about it? Why did you think it might do well on Steam?
ES: Strange Horticulture had a really great demo. The art is adorable, the characters are charming and the mystery is really intriguing. It's also an oddly relaxing game that captures the vibes of tabletop classic like Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective, a real rainy-day experience with a wonderful pace, we just loved it.
In commercial terms, the
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