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Indie developer Petter Malmehed released his unconventional alternate reality puzzle game After Hours in 2018, and according to Malmehed himself, it did alright, even if it wasn't a big commercial success. However, in recent months and years, he's seen its user reviews on Steam gradually decline at the same time as its completion rate is steadily dropping, and he thinks he knows why.
Email. And super young people. They don't get it, apparently. For my elder Gen-Z and older readers, this may be confounding. What's the problem with email? You hit compose, you type in a brief subject line, and then the rest goes in the body, with some incredibly antiquated sign-off like "all best" before your digital signature. Well, if the 'subject line' part of all of that left you scratching your head, you're substantiating Malmehed's theory.
In a Reddit post and in conversation with Polygon, Malmehed explained that in 2024, he started seeing reviews for After Hours sink "lower and lower," and he didn't know why. He was also getting specific feedback that the game was "too hard" and seeing completion rates plummet, and so he did a little digging. It turns out, an NPC named Sarah, who is able to receive real-life emails from players crucial to advancement of the story, held all the answers.
Malmehed looked in Sarah's email inbox and found thousands of emails from 2025 alone. Concerningly, he also saw that "about a third of them" didn't have anything in the main body - everything was crammed into the subject line, which was preventing the in-game system from identifying the keywords necessary to respond.
"That's something I've noticed a lot of young people are doing these days," he told Polygon. "So I believe the users are in general pretty young."
Of course, there's no way to nail down precisely which and how many variables are contributing to a game's downward trajectory - especially when that game only has 57 total Steam reviews in the first place - but Malmehed is taking the blame and working on tools to better communicate how the game works.
"No form of modern communication requires a subject and a body — it's easy to see how people [who are] not familiar with email aren't filling out both fields."
Digging into Malmehed's more recent projects, I think it is extremely wise for him to be accepting some level of responsibility in all of this. His 2025 puzzler Palm Cracker takes place on the screen of a stolen PalmPilot, a device so old even I almost forgot what it was, and I'm in my mid-30s. Ironically, however, that game has the highest Steam reviews of Malmehed's body of work with a "very positive" rating at the time of writing. Maybe that's the key: embrace the millennial nostalgia and make a Tamagotchi game next.
Or just pick something from our list of the best PC games to play right now.
