Mewgenics is a clear hit reaching over a million sales

Odd thing to say. To me it's very obvious that a reasonably deep turn-based roguelike with some whimsy and personality, AND cats is more popular than the thematic downer that is The Binding of Isaac or the tough as nails meat grinder of a precision platformer.

I guess it's possible to spend years dedicating your life to something unaware of what it is that you're actually doing?

This is what an actual independent game success looks like. Not what the Tencent-funded industry plant that Highguard masqueraded and rightfully failed to be.

Last edited by fenglengshun on 19 Feb 2026 at 10:12 am UTC

Quoting: suchOdd thing to say. To me it's very obvious that a reasonably deep turn-based roguelike with some whimsy and personality, AND cats is more popular than the thematic downer that is The Binding of Isaac or the tough as nails meat grinder of a precision platformer.

I guess it's possible to spend years dedicating your life to something unaware of what it is that you're actually doing?

The point is - nothing in game development is guaranteed. We've seen lots of games fail that many thought would be a clear success.

Nothing in life is guaranteed, that's pretty trite, but with Mewgenics there were clear signs the second the media picked it up for the preview cycle. It's not even that it was praised, it's about the type of praise it received, and how it was framed. It wasn't brought up as a quaint indie game by oddball creator first, it wasn't as subjected (if at all) to your typical template-driven news/preview slop. It came across as though people who played it prior to release viscerally liked it and needed to tell you about how much fun they had. At least from what I was seeing it was as much a done deal as humanly possible.

Perhaps I have a career in industry predictions, I dunno ;)

Compare to something like the late Cyberpunk 2077 previews which were all extremely politely lukewarm, but also somehow framed to maintain the ridiculous level of praise from much earlier in that marketing cycle. You could've mapped pretty much the entirety of the design, system and content issues of that game right then, from the universally positive previews, without even looking at the game. Not with certainty, obviously, but the signs were all there.

Last edited by such on 19 Feb 2026 at 1:02 pm UTC