One of the highest-rated strategy games of 2025 comes from Tommy McKay and Patrick Bell of developer Dystopian, who worked on roguelike tower defense game Gnomes for about 10 months. It's sitting at the coveted "Overwhelmingly Positive" review mark on Steam, where it's grossed over $360,000 since its April launch.
That's according to a recent report from marketing and Steam expert Chris Zukowski, who profiled Gnomes and McKay. As of August 13, Gnomes had grossed $367,484 before Valve's 30% cut (of around $108,000 if we use this figure as a base) comes out. The game's budget – apart from the whole labor thing, which is handily the biggest expense in game development – was about $700, it seems, covering both the Steam fee and listing art commission.
McKay also discussed his history with game development in a July talk for Technically Games at the Queensland Games Festival 2025. "Why do I like Steam?" he ponders. "The first thing is it costs you $150 [AUD] to submit a game to Steam. That's it. They take 30% of your revenue, but it's totally worth it."
McKay said the most powerful feature of Steam is the wishlist feature, which lets developers convert interested players into actual buyers, and also jumps on the power and importance of festival participation and demo releases.
Similar features and player behavior came up when I spoke with Zukowski about the magic of Steam earlier this year, and how Valve "cracked the problem that Netflix was struggling with." His profile of Gnomes is a developer-minded breakdown of thresholds and strategies, with observations for milestones like wishlists and Steam discovery queue behavior, but also functions as an interesting example of how sub-mega hits can still reach a lot of people on Steam.
Gnomes pits armies of goblins against your battalions of gnomes, small-statured forces upgraded and positioned after every round as you hope to survive procedurally generated encounters long enough to one day face the goblin king.
Where most tower defense games revel in simplicity – Zukowski rightly singles out genre giant Bloons – Gnomes leans more on systemic progression and less predictable challenges, leveraging the roguelike vehicle to build depth and surprise. It's been on my wishlist for a while, too, and I'm now hungrier than ever to give it a go.
McKay released another, simpler roguelike, Sea of Survivors, in 2023. It's a Vampire Survivors-like with sea monsters and pirates, and it was also reviewed pretty well, but it never found the same momentum as Gnomes. This is where the power of that added depth really shines.
To this day, the Gnomes Steam community is awash with players constructing increasingly complex labyrinths, mazes, and what seem to be circuit boards to honor and defend the gnome gods. I've played some Bloons in my day, but I've never constructed anything resembling a Minecraft RAM array.
