Sabrina Becker and Jonathan Hau-Yoon discuss how Dressmaker appealed to people who wouldn't normally play games, and why more indies should follow in their footsteps

You may have seen enthusiastic posts about Dressmaker doing the rounds on social media. It's yet another example of an indie game blowing up on Steam, seemingly out of nowhere: Video Game Insights estimates that Dressmaker has sold over 482,000 units since its release on September 21.

Jonathan Hau-Yoon, who is part of the Dressmaker team at South African developer/publisher Free Lives, and who previously worked on the strategy title Terra Nil, says he was surprised at the scale of the game's success. "We definitely thought the game would do well," he tells GamesIndustry.biz, "but maybe in the top three or four games that Free Lives has made before, instead of the astronomical success that it has had."

The really interesting thing about Dressmaker's success, however, is that the number of players just kept on growing after launch, rather than following the usual pattern of an initial spike followed by a tapered decline. On day one, the game's maximum daily concurrent user (CCU) count was just under 8,000, according to Video Game Insights. But by day seven, that figure had leapt up to just over 35,000, and by day 14, it had reached more than 43,000. And remarkably, all of this was done without paid marketing (in the West at least; Hau-Yoon says some content creators in China were paid, although he notes the majority of the game's players are in North America and Europe).

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