'We have more levels than players': This indie dev's game was a complete flop, but he's powering through with his plan to release 20 seasons of new content anyway
I was initially attracted to Endlight, a weird indie game about getting hoops, by its intense, almost overwhelming trailer, but what hooked me were the less obvious but very clever bits lying beneath its sensory onslaught: Levels are punctuated by odd, sometimes very funny chunks of text that made me feel as though developer Jim McGinley was watching and talking in the background as I played. I also loved the game's central conceit: Every level can only be completed once. After it's gone, it's gone forever.
The twist is that once a year, Endlight offers a «Right to Replay» challenge, the reward being an in-game «coupon» allowing the holder to play Endlight again—but just once, from the very beginning—at any time over the following 12 months. It's twisted, completely counter-intuitive, and to McGinley, extremely funny: He acknowledged that a lot of players would hate the idea, but added, «I think people will come around to appreciating the humour.»
Some no doubt did. Endlight has a «positive» user rating on Steam, which is good: The bad is, that rating comes from just 28 reviews. Endlight launched on Steam in July 2023, and put up an all-time peak concurrent player count of—it almost physically hurts to say this—three. Endlight, McGinley said earlier this year, has more levels than players.
«Still the case!» he told me in a more recent chat. «After returns, we're at ~325 sales. Endlight has 16 seasons, 400 levels.»
Endlight's launched with 100 levels, but they're very short: Some of them can be completed in a matter of seconds if you're lucky. McGinley's plan to keep people playing was to release monthly «seasons» of 25 levels each, all of them free, bringing the total number of Endlight levels up to 500 when all were finally out. I wondered if he might be having second thoughts, since nobody's playing them anyway—two people have made it to the end of season eight, just one has completed everything so far—but that's not happening: McGinley committed to 20 seasons,
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