Narrative RPG 1000xResistance became a critical darling when it released in May 2024 – but like so many other great indie games, it didn’t get its flowers at the Game Awards in December. But buzz has been building around the game since the TGA nominees were announced, according to Sunset Visiter 斜陽過客 founder and creative director Remy Siu. Now, Siu reports that the highest sales day of all time was January 2, 2025, almost exactly seven months after its release.
According to Siu, the buzz is mainly due to anger against the electoral apparatus which excluded the title from the nominations.
“I was on a plane home – I was on vacation for the first time in four years – and I bought internet on the plane to watch the Game Awards nomination announcements. Unfortunately, we weren’t nominated for anything. I was a little sad about it, but I thought yes, it makes sense, we are a small experimental game,” Siu told me in a message from Bluesky. “But almost immediately after the announcements, people started posting about how unhappy they were about not being included.”
Siu said the “non-sales rest rate”, i.e. its sales rate under normal conditions, increased slightly after these appointments, announced in August. A round of fall sales in September, October and November meant more wish lists and more purchases, and Siu said the Game Awards on December 12 started another reactionary conversation about gaming. The Last Domino at to fall ? The game’s victory for Narrative Game at the first-ever Indie Game Awards.
“Sales numbers were not poor before January 1,” Siu said, clarifying that developers expected an overall decrease in sales at that time. “We must remember that 1000xRESIST is a weird, experimental narrative game without traditional gameplay that talks about things most games don’t talk about – and also, we wanted to keep a lot of things secret.
Siu said the game’s release and reception trajectory taught him the value of post-launch marketing, but that this incident was perhaps worth the risk of keeping the game’s secrets, well, secret. “I think we always knew that if we were able to have a compelling enough experience, it would come down to word of mouth. People would have to discover it over time,” he said. And that’s exactly what happened.
It’s a rare but encouraging achievement that highlights the power of the indie community and decentralized forms of marketing, like word of mouth – despite Siu’s claim that “the indie game distribution apparatus doesn’t It’s not always well suited to making these kinds of experiences possible, from what I can tell.
Siu attributes several factors to the game’s recent surge in sales: the timing of the industry’s move to Bluesky, Steam deals and free collaborations with other indie developers, getting mentions on best-of lists. year like ours and collaborations with other games like Balatro. But, Siu theorized, missing out on The Game Awards and the reaction it got from fans who really understood the game was an unexpected boon.
“I hope word of mouth continues to allow more people to experience the game,” Siu said. “I think there’s enough evidence now that it really works and that it allows us to make more games in the future.”
