Solo dev spends 6 weeks making a short free game, accidentally wins the Steam algorithm and makes $4,200 in 5 days, then rushes to prepare a big update: "Seems the people liked my honesty and that I don't have any hidden costs"

Max Ritters, the solo creator of Idle Pixel Fantasy, had modest ambitions for his latest idle clicker game. He spent just "1.5 months" making it as a "little side project," he wrote on the IndieDev Reddit, so when it suddenly made over $4,000 within five days, he had to get the lead out to work on an update that could meet player appetite.

Idle Pixel Fantasy is a 2D, pixel art clicker/cumulative game where you build up rows of fantasy RPG-lite characters that generate resources, expand your base, and work toward higher-level layers of the world. I look at it and my mind goes back to pleasant days spent playing Insaniquarium in school computer labs.

The ultimate goal is to "reach the top layer and defeat the dragon," but the journey is the point with these games, and Idle Pixel Fantasy really leans into "relaxing gameplay." It's reviewed well at 85% positive with 287 user reviews.

It was released on September 22, and per Ritters' post, earned $4,285 of gross revenue within five days. The game is free, so all of that revenue would have come from the optional cosmetic and character DLCs which were sold in a 'support the developer' kind of way for $1 or $2 apiece.

"Note: The game can be fully finished without this DLCs but it's a nice way to support me, the solo developer," the DLC Steam blurb reads.

"I checked a lot of other free games, most of them have some sort of in-game microtransaction and I'm not a fan of it," Ritters says on Reddit. He speculates "people liked my honesty and that I don't have any hidden costs," and were therefore happy to chip in for some cute, minor DLCs that are totally on the side. Most people have bought all of the DLCs at once, Ritters explains in a Reddit reply.

By so many metrics, Idle Pixel Fantasy's success came as a surprise. The Steam audience for idle games is remarkably big, but the genre is also hugely competitive. Ritters says the game didn't have "a lot of wishlists," and its Steam page was only live for a month before release, so it didn't have a huge edge in visibility. In a reply, he says "I paid some guy on Fiverr to do the trailer because I have no editing skills."

Ritters has released several similar games on Steam before (sometimes under Maximillian Ritters), but none of them even came close to Idle Pixel Fantasy's success. It's an outlier in many ways, and a fascinating example of how games and developers can find success, and what success may look like. Far more often than not, it's not your very first game catching fire and setting you up for life, as interesting as those breakout stories are.

"I'm preparing a big update because the players ask for more," Ritters says.

"Maybe I should also say that this is my 7th released game on steam, it seems sometimes you just have to keep going," he concludes. "We all can do it!"

"For the first time ever," Valve reminds us, the Steam Autumn Sale is live 2 months early – like, right now.