Steam Week in Review: This indie publisher released 29 terrible-looking Steam games in a single day—will they make any money?
It’s been a busy week for prodigious game publisher Hard Shark Games: on September 15 it released an astonishing 29 games on Steam across a huge variety of genres.
Not only did Hard Shark Games publish that many games, but the company is also marked as developer for every one of them. All of which, mind you, are early access affairs. “We’re launching in Early Access to involve the community from the very start,” reads the first sentence of every single one of the early access blurbs for Hard Shark Games released in September 2026, which include genres as diverse as racing, retail sim, survival horror, sport, flight sim and 2D platformer.
The same is true for some of the 29 games Hard Shark Games released on March 4 last year: “We’re launching in Early Access to involve the community from the very start,” reads the first line in the blurb for Speedboat Simulator. “We’re launching in Early Access to involve the community from the very start,” reads the first line in the blurb for Toy Battlegrounds: Shoot ‘Em Up Survival. You get the idea.
The “company” has also taken a similar approach to early access updates: the update notes for Starship Fighters, Sky Combat and Streets of Rageness (!) are identical: “Optimized several core systems, resulting in smoother gameplay and up to 10% better overall performance, especially during longer sessions,” reads the first sentence of all three, each of which were published on March 5 within five minutes of each other.
Will Hard Shark Games profit from any of the 29 Steam games it released last week? You may be surprised. It costs $100 to open a Steam store page, which is recoupable if a game makes more than $1,000 adjusted gross revenue. So it would have cost Hard Shark Games $2,900 to publish its 29 very unpromising looking games on Steam, all of which carry an AI disclosure for capsule art but no other aspect of development.
Using the popular Boxleiter Method (via impress.games), which uses a game’s public Steam review count to estimate sales, Supermarket Life Simulator—to use just one example—could have made as much as $885 as a high estimate, or $295 on the lower end. Then there’s Pool: it could have made as much as $2,780 or as little as $926. Meanwhile, for F1 Simulator we’re looking at $1,686 as a high estimate and $562 as a low.
So adding up the low estimates, those three games alone—of 29—have made $1,783 in the five days since release. That’s well over half of Hard Shark Games’ outlay for the store listings in less than a week on the market, though if the high estimates are more accurate, the $2,900 outlay has been long passed and Hard Shark Games’ investment is already paying off handsomely.
Of course, that assumes these games cost nothing to make, and that’s unlikely, even though they all look pretty low effort. For example, Supermarket Life Simulator clearly uses the $50 Checkout Frenzy – Convenience Store Simulator Unity template, which very many retail sims on Steam do. There’s nothing wrong with using a template, but comparing the images of Supermarket Life Simulator with the Unity template screenshots reveals some identical grocery imagery. Steam user reviews claim Supermarket Life Simulator is a straight asset flip of the template, and this is an accusation levelled at Hard Shark Games quite often.
(Also: how the heck did Kratos end up in a screenshot for the creative-titled Axe Slasher?)
Hard Shark Games has a total of 217 listings on Steam. Of all of those—which take in 121 games and 96 demos—the highest peak concurrent player figure is a whopping 13. To add insult to injury, that record high is for a demo, namely Supermarket Simulator Pro Demo, which is no longer available. So not many people play these games in the scheme of things, but assuming Hard Shark Games is just one person turning out extremely cheap template-based software at a rapid pace, the enterprise is definitely capable of making a tidy sum of money.
I’ve reached out to Hard Shark Games to see if someone there will shed further light on their method. It’s hardly the least prolific publisher on Steam though: BFG Entertainment has released a whopping 555 games, while PlayWay—the spiritual home of quickly turned around retail sims—has 340.
Top Steam games by revenue (September 8 – 15)
|
Rank |
Game |
|---|---|
|
1 |
Wardogs |
|
2 |
PUBG: Battlegrounds |
|
3 |
Counter-Strike 2 |
|
4 |
Apex Legends |
|
5 |
Marvel Rivals |
|
6 |
Halloween: The Game |
|
7 |
Dota 2 |
|
8 |
Overwatch |
|
9 |
Bodycam |
|
10 |
The Blood of Dawnwalker |
Wardogs hitting number one in its launch week was inevitable: it’s a rare example of an early access multiplayer launch where the conversation isn’t focused on what’s wrong with the game. Players—including our Morgan—seem to be loving it.
Last week The Blood of Dawnwalker hit number one in its launch week; now it’s down to 10, which is a good result for a single player RPG. It did seem to outperform Onimusha, on PC at least: last week the latter ranked sixth, while this week it’s at 13th. It’s likely selling much better on PlayStation.
Halloween: The Game isn’t available in Australia—it was refused classification—but appears in the chart nevertheless.
Last week’s Steam deep cuts
