Bramble Royale Steam Launch Retro

How my game flopped on Steam after 4 years in development

Hi! I’m Eric Farraro and the Game Designer, Programmer and overall lead for Bramble Royale.

We recently launched Meteorfall: Bramble Royale on Steam [link] on March 26 after several years in development. Although it’s not a direct sequel, Bramble Royale is the third game in the popular series ‘Meteorfall’. The series launched in 2017 with the titular ‘Meteorfall’, followed by ‘Krumit’s Tale’ in 2020.

The launch was technically successful - no major showstoppers or bugs. The reviews so far have been positive and the folks playing it seem to really enjoy it. I’m extremely proud of what we built. I think it’s a high quality package that brings a lot of new & interesting ideas to the genre.

But from a sales perspective, there’s no easy way to put it: the Steam launch was a colossal failure.

Wait - what is ‘Bramble Royale’ exactly?

Bramble Royale is a card-based deckbuilder that takes place on a grid. You choose a team of 3 heroes, which determines your starting card pool. You face off against enemy teams in an arena. If you lose, the run is over - but if you win, you get to visit the town where you’ll upgrade & improve your deck. Rinse and repeat until you’re either the champion of the arena or you’re defeated.

The loop is immediately familiar to anyone has played Slay the Spire or any of its descendants, such as Balatro. If you distill this genre down, the core elements are simple:

1. Run-based ‘roguelike’ gameplay. Win or lose, the game is meant to be played over, with replayability coming from the RNG of what improvements you’re offered and which enemies you face

2. The ability to add / remove / upgrade or otherwise improve your ‘deck’ (typically a deck of cards, but not always)

Upgrade your deck between battles in town

The goal of Bramble was to develop a card-based deckbuilder for the modern era that’s faster pace than Slay the Spire. To that end, Bramble features a lot of ‘card draw’ elements that allow you to quickly cycle through you deck instead of just playing out the cards you drew.

There a lot of other tweaks to the formula: team-based gameplay, feats (many achievements in battle that wow the crowd and give you bonuses when completed), wild cards that change the rule of the game, etc…

But did the visual language and screenshots of the game adequately convey these innovations? More on this in a bit.

Great Expectations

In 2023-2024 as Bramble started to take shape, I had lofty expectations. Though not a jackpot hit, the Meteorfall series had managed to generate over $1.1M net revenue and sold 100k’s of copies since 2017. The previous game, Krumit’s Tale, grossed $108k on Steam in its first year, achieving 174 CCU at its peak.

I was certain that I could achieve at least that level of success. I’d built up a bunch of fans through the launch of Krumit’s Tale, and had learned a lot about game design that could be applied to the next game. The game was bigger than ever in terms of production value: more content! cutscenes! professional localization! voice acting!

And importantly, while Krumit was a difficult game to describe in an elevator pitch, you can understand Bramble (more or less) just by looking at it. I was confident Bramble Royale would have more mainstream appeal on appearance alone.

The wishlist rate started out slow but suddenly peaked with the release of a demo in September 2024. A one-two punch of a Retromation video [link] and a Rock Paper Shotgun article [link] about the demo helped give Bramble the biggest single day number of wishlists in its entire lifecycle.

Unfortunately, there was no long term boost from the coverage and the game failed to maintain the momentum. Meteorfall helped Bramble get a foot in the door with influencers, but Bramble failed the interview in the court of public opinion.

Heading into the February Steam Next Fest, my expectations had been slightly tempered. Wishlists had stalled out in the 2500-3000 range but I hoped that Next Fest might boost the game’s fortunes. The game is good. The problem is that no one knows about it, I thought. Next Fest will fix it.

Next Fest did make a noticeable impact in terms of wishlists but Bramble greatly underperformed relative to peers

Spoiler alert: Next Fest did little to change the trajectory of the game’s wishlists. It did receive a notable and impactful increase in wishlist during the festival, but performed below almost all peer games.

Bramble’s performance in Next Fest confirmed what I already assumed but didn’t want to believe: Next Fest is a good multiplier for a game that has achieved product market fit, but won’t save a game that isn’t able to generate sustained interest on its own.

In fact, Bramble performed so poorly during Next Fest that when I looked at a ranked list of games tagged with ‘deckbuilder’, Bramble was down at about 50 or so. The game was not even competitive in its peer group, much less relative to popular games in other genres.

The Home Stretch

Following Next Fest, I began to accept the disasppointing reality that I’d simply overestimated the level of commercial success Bramble Royale would achieve, and I attempted to become more clear-eyed about my sales projections.

Based on the wishlists I reached in the time leading up to release (4500) and applying some ‘common wisdom’ about how to predict how wishlists convert into sales, I came up with a Year 1 prediction of $49,000 - $86,000.

Krumit’s Tale achievied 174 CCU at launch. Bramble Royale topped out at 35

In its first week, Bramble Royale sold only 621 units and grossed a mere $7,100. Assuming a week 1 to year 1 multiplier of ~3 to 5x (based on median / average numbers from other developers), we can assume year 1 gross sales of $22,000 - $38,000. To put it in perspective, this is only 25 to 30% of the gross revenue of Krumit’s Tale in its first year.

Interestingly, Krumit’s Early Access launch grossed only $6,294 in the first week, which is more in line with what Bramble achieved. The difference is that Krumit achieved far more wishlists during Early Access and got a another bite at the apple with its 1.0 launch. Would going the Early Access route have changed Bramble’s fate? (More analysis on this below)

In other words, Bramble Royale on only underperformed my estimate, but underperformed the low-end of the estimate by a significant margin.

I initially expected the game would pay for its upfront development costs in the first six months. The reality is that Bramble may take years to even recoup its development cost, and that assumes my ‘salary’ is $0.

So what happened?!

I have a lot of thoughts about why Bramble Royale failed to perform. The truth probably lies somewhere in the middle of all of these.

Deckbuilders are a dime a dozen in 2025

People are just really fatigued on card / deck builder games. I used to play every deckbuilder that released. Now, I just see another ‘Slay the Spire’ clone and skip past it. I’m sure a large number of people felt that way about Bramble Royale.

Not to say that games won’t find success anymore in this genre, but that you really need something special (or lucky) to crack the code.

The game lacked a marketable hook

There are are a lot of interesting ideas in Bramble Royale: team-based gameplay, interesting upgrade system, fast-paced card draw, etc… but unfortunately none of these are hooks. They’re merely improvements on a genre that is extremely crowded.

Some examples of games with strong hooks include games like Dungeon Clawler. You watch a video of someone grabbing tokens out of a claw machine and you instantly get it. Same with games like ‘Ballionaire’ which apply physics / pachinko to the formula. Luck be a Landlord is a ‘slot-machine’ roguelike. Even just reading the sentence piques your attention: this is something new, fresh and interesting.

Dungeon Clawler: a game with a hook (no pun intended)

Meteorfall is best known as a mobile franchise

Meteorfall started a mobile franchise and has always sold better on mobile than on Steam. About 70% (and growing) of lifetime revenue actually comes from iOS and Android. The most common question I get for Bramble Royale is: mobile port when? A decent chunk of fans I’ve talked to are skipping the Steam release in favor of the mobile release.

Hoping that the game performs better on mobile is one potential future brightspot, although by no means guaranteed. The fact that the game performed poorly on Steam means that the mobile reception is likely to be muted as well.

The development cycle was too long

The development cycle was about 4 years of part-time development and that was far too long. I squandered whatever brand recognition Meteorfall / Krumit had, and as mentioned above, I feel like the deckbuilder genre and industry trends also shifted underneath me in that time.

Survivorship bias clouded my initial projections

I may also have fallen victim to survivorship bias in my initial predictions to begin with. Neither Meteorfall or Krumit’s Tale were ‘Balatro’ but they achieved moderate success, given their niche status.

My original sin may have been the hubris to think that Meteorfall could strike lightning thrice in a row.

Early Access: a longer runway to success?

Bramble Royale had 4500 wishlists at launch, with no Early Access period. Krumit’s Tale had 1400 wishlists at the launch of Early Access, but more than 18k by the time it hit 1.0. The long runway during Early Access helped build wishlists for Krumit’s Tale. Thinking back, I now wonder if Krumit’s Tale would’ve flopped out of the gate without the interest it built during EA as well.

At the time of Krumit’s release, I second guessed the Early Access process because I felt it divided your hype across two launch windows, resulting in a muted launch since the game was technically already launched before your 1.0 release. In hindsight, I’m now second guessing my decision not to put Bramble Royale through Early Access.

Krumit was slow to earn wishlists but gained more than 18k over nearly a year of Early Access development

So what does that mean for Bramble Royale and Meteorfall?

The good news is that we’re still forging ahead! That means more Bramble Royale - mobile port, new heroes, etc… and yes, more Meteorfall games (probably no ‘Bramble Royale 2’ any time soon, though!)

Game development has always been a labor of love. I work full-time (not on games) and don’t depend on the income from Meteorfall to pay the bills. I make games because I love making games. This allows me to make the games I want to make without stressing too much about the commercial reception. Income from the previous games help me hire amazing collaborators to help make more games, but I don’t depend on it for the mortgage.

We’re heads down on the mobile (iOS & Android) port of Bramble Royale, which I hope to have out in late Q2. From there, I have a couple heroes that I’ve been brainstorming for Bramble Royale, along with some other content updates to extend the life of the game. We intend to fully support Bramble despite the reception on Steam.

In parallel with the Bramble Royale content updates, I’m extremely eager to get back to prototyping. As developers know, releasing a game is absolutely exhausting and I’m ready to get back into that hopeful prototyping mode where anything’s possible.

For my next game, I’d like to think a bit more creatively about how to really push the envelope in terms of creative gameplay. I feel like we did some really interesting things with Bramble Royale as far as deckbuilders go, but if you’re burned out on deck builders, you’re probably not trying Bramble.

I’m also intrigued by games with extended demos or Early Access periods like Die in the Dungeon and Backpack Battles, or games that use Itch.io to iterate and find the sauce before further investment. I’d like to try to find some way to battle test ideas and see what sticks before investing multiple years on a concept that fails in the market.

I’m not ready to share exactly what’s next for Meteorfall but I have a lot of ideas, and I’m really excited to get started on these later this year.

Conclusion

I’m conflicted on my overall feelings towards Bramble Royale: simulatenously proud of the game we built, while also deeply disappointed in how its performed at launch, as a matter of personal pride. Every time I play Bramble, I’m struck by how much fun it is and how well the whole package game together: the design, the art, the sound, etc.

But part of making art is knowing that other people enjoy what you’ve made. In the capitalist society we live in, we often conflate the worthiness of art with its economic value. Philosphically, one can disagree about whether art should be judged in that way, but it’s hard not to feel a little bad about the game through that lens.

I was particularly struck during the development of Bramble by this post on X [link] by Franek Nowotniak, reflecting on the launch of Arco. Making a good game is hard enough; making one that sells well is even harder.

I’ve written transparently about my thoughts [link] on releasing the Meteorfall series over the years, in hopes that the learnings could inspire or caution other indie developers in their journey.

This particular story is one of caution. Game development is a a fraught business. Past performance by no means guarantees future success. If I’d quit my day job to make indie games full-time, I’d be in a difficult place right now.

Thankfully, there’s still more pages in the Meteorfall story and I’ll be sure to share my stories, wherever the journey takes me.