Aptly named dressmaking sim Dressmaker was an unexpectedly massive success for developer Cozy Lives, led by married duo Sabrina Becker and Jonathan Hau-Yoon. With 17,530 user reviews averaging 98% positive a month after release, and over 15,000 average concurrent players still keeping it in Steam's top 100 even as a small single-player game, Dressmaker is a hit by every metric. On top of the game being extremely absorbing and satisfying, Becker reckons this was partly down to appealing to an undeserved group in games: women.
"We were definitely targeting women from the get-go," Becker tells me. "The fact that we have gotten so many men interested as well is just a great bonus. But women are such an underserved market in video games, even though women love video games. I think people sort of assume that women don't play games because they don't like them, but women just don't play games because there aren't games that are geared towards what they're interested in."
There's a surprisingly large population of women, not just young girls, on game platforms like Roblox engaging with "these dress-up games," Becker observes, "even though they don't have the best experience, because they are really craving that type of gameplay and there's nowhere else that offers it. That was one of the inspirations in making Dressmaker. If that's what they want, we can give that to them."
The top-rated Steam reviews for Dressmaker bear this out. A self-describer nursing home caretaker writes, "Dressmaker team, please know that you have created something extremely special here. You have given old ladies with arthritis the gift of dressmaking again. You have inspired me to get out my sewing machine again. And our experiences are only a drop in the ocean; you have touched so many lives with this game."
Another Steam reviewer discusses their mother's history as a seamstress. "My mom saw me playing the game, and she was interested!" they say. "She's never really shown interest in my games beyond a curiosity of what I was doing, but with Dressmaker? She wants to play it! She actually wants to play it!!!!! I connected with this game because of my mother and the love of dressmaking she gave me, and now I can connect this game with my mother because of the very same love. She may never seriously play another videogame but Dressmaker has given us something to play together, and that means a lot to me."
Becker, who worked in fashion before the chronic illness Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (EDS) forced her to change her career, says it was a no-brainer. "It just seemed like if we were going to make a game about making dresses, which is a stereotypically feminine interest, we should definitely make it very feminine and target it towards women," she adds.
Dressmaker resonates so strongly partly because Becker is in a similar place as those Steam reviewers. "I was pursuing costume design," she explains. "I've been really passionate about sewing and clothing since I was a kid. My mom taught me how to sew, and she was a designer, so it's very much a thing that has been a part of my life.
"And then when I was diagnosed with EDS and I became very ill, I was unable to pursue that and engage with that passion, so I just sort of shelved it and focused on the things that I could do and that I could engage with. Over time, I slowly built my health back up again, and that lined up perfectly with when Jonathan wanted to pursue making Dressmaker at the studio."
After the huge launch, Hau-Yoon says, "Sabrina's over the moon. I'm kind of overwhelmed. I feel as if I was prepared to work up to shipping the game and then also patch things afterward, and I wasn't really prepared for the very large flood of players and media attention and whatnot."
"I'm just so happy that so many people love the game," Becker adds.
Dressmaker isn't even really finished. Cozy Lives actually expected the game to have a bigger audience on mobile and Nintendo Switch, and it will eventually be ported to other platforms. Iterating and updating on PC is just easier with less platform certification to clear, so Dressmaker started on Steam. With such a massive audience already showing up, there are definitely plans for major updates in the future. I asked for a teaser on one, and Becker mentioned an online feature that lets players vote on their favorite dress designs.
"We love this game so much, and it was always our hope that we would be able to continue working on it and build on it," Becker says. "There are so many things that we would love to bring to the game and the world, so we're really enthusiastic now that we have the opportunity to do that."
"The Dressmaker that was launched was very much, 'This is the best we can do when we are time and budget-constrained,'" says Hau-Yoon. "There are a bunch of things that we really wanted to get into the game that we didn't get to, so now we have time to do this backlog of things, which is really exciting."
