How Do Tiny Teams Make Huge Games? The Micro-Studio Era
Updated October 2, 2026
By Emre Şahiner, game designer at Overbaked Studio. Last verified October 2026.
What is a micro-studio? A micro-studio is a game studio of one to five people that ships commercially, using free engines, direct Steam distribution, and a publisher hired only for ports and marketing. That is the shape behind nearly every name below.
Most of the biggest indie games of the past decade were built by one to five people. Stardew Valley, Balatro, Lethal Company, Undertale, and Animal Well began as solo projects, and indie games took more than a quarter of Steam’s revenue in 2025, according to Alinea Analytics. Here is what makes that possible, and what the numbers leave out.
How much money do small indie games actually make?
Indie games accounted for more than 25% of revenue on Steam in 2025, according to Alinea Analytics’ Year in Review 2025 (checked October 2026). Its indie best sellers among that year’s new releases were led by Schedule I, at more than $150 million in gross revenue, followed by R.E.P.O., PEAK, Hollow Knight: Silksong, and Escape from Duckov.
The teams behind those games are the interesting part. Schedule I comes from TVGS (Tyler’s Video Game Studio), an Australian developer. Hollow Knight: Silksong comes from Team Cherry, a small studio in Adelaide. PEAK’s core, the same report notes, was built in roughly four weeks during a game jam. More than a quarter of the revenue on the world’s largest PC store now flows to games that would once have been dismissed as hobby projects.
We saw the same pattern from the genre side when we asked whether the cozy game genre is growing: the money increasingly follows small, specific games.
Which huge games were actually made by one person?
The list is longer than most people expect. Every sales figure below comes from a developer, publisher, or named analyst:
| Game | Developer | Team size | Years in development | Sales figure | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stardew Valley | Eric Barone | 1 | over 4 | over 50 million copies by February 2026 | Barone’s own announcements |
| Balatro | LocalThunk | 1 | unannounced | 5 million copies by January 2025 | Playstack, the publisher |
| Lethal Company | Zeekerss | 1 | unannounced | an estimated 10 million copies within months | the analyst behind Push To Talk |
| Animal Well | Billy Basso | 1 | 7 | unannounced | unannounced |
| Vampire Survivors | Luca Galante (poncle) | 1 | about 1, to early access | unannounced | unannounced |
| Undertale | Toby Fox | 1, plus art from Temmie Chang | unannounced | unannounced | unannounced |
| Minecraft | Markus Persson | 1 at the start | unannounced | over 300 million copies | Mojang’s 2023 announcement |
The detail behind those rows, including what each developer actually did alone:
- Stardew Valley. Eric Barone spent over four years writing the code, drawing the art, and composing the music alone. Released in 2016, it had sold more than 50 million copies by February 2026, per Barone’s own announcements.
- Balatro. An anonymous solo developer called LocalThunk released it in February 2024. It sold a million copies in its first month and passed 5 million by January 2025, according to publisher Playstack.
- Lethal Company. Zeekerss built it alone in Unity and launched it into early access in October 2023. Valve publishes no official sales data, but the analyst behind Push To Talk estimated over 10 million copies within months.
- Animal Well. Billy Basso spent seven years building it solo, including writing his own engine, before Bigmode published it in May 2024.
- Vampire Survivors. Luca Galante started it in 2020 while unemployed. The first early access version took about a year, and he spent around 1,100 GBP on assets, art, and music along the way (Wikipedia).
- Undertale. Toby Fox wrote, scripted, and composed nearly all of it himself in 2015, with additional art from Temmie Chang.
- Minecraft. Over 300 million copies sold per Mojang’s 2023 announcement, and it began as Markus Persson’s solo project in 2009.
What changed to make one-person games viable?
Four structural shifts, none of them about talent getting better:
Engines became free. Unity, Unreal, and Godot cost nothing until a game earns real money. Luca Galante built Vampire Survivors in Phaser, a free web framework. Billy Basso wrote his own engine for Animal Well. The tooling that used to require a licensed studio now requires a laptop.
Steam removed the shelf. There is no retail shelf space to fight for and no distribution deal to sign. A solo developer like LocalThunk and a small team like Adelaide’s Team Cherry reach the same storefront as the largest publishers, on the same revenue terms.
Publishers reshaped themselves around small teams. Playstack handled Balatro’s console ports and marketing while LocalThunk stayed a team of one. Bigmode, founded by the YouTuber videogamedunkey, exists specifically to back small distinctive games and made Animal Well its first release. Devolver Digital built an entire catalog on this model.
Marketing moved to the community. Vampire Survivors drew far more sales than Galante expected for a small project he made while unemployed. Lethal Company spread through streamers and YouTube clips. Discovery now runs through creators, demos, and wishlists, the same channels we track in our list of Steam hidden gems worth wishlisting.
Is this just survivorship bias?
Partly, yes. About 20,000 games were released on Steam in 2025, and only about 300 of them grossed $1 million or more, according to the same Alinea Analytics report (checked October 2026). The distribution is top-heavy.
What the data supports is narrower than the headlines suggest: the ceiling rose, the floor did not. A tiny team can now reach an outcome that used to require a hundred people, and most tiny teams still will not. Most of the winners also took their time. Barone spent four and a half years, Basso seven, and Zeekerss had been making games on Roblox since 2012, more than a decade before Lethal Company. Vampire Survivors is the exception, and a small game by design: its first early access version took about a year. The next section puts real schedules side by side.
How long does it take to make an indie game?
Years, for each of the three best-documented schedules we could source: about four and a half for Stardew Valley and about seven each for Cuphead and Animal Well.
| Game | Team | Development time | Steam release date (checked October 2026) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stardew Valley | Eric Barone, solo | about 4.5 years | 26 February 2016 |
| Cuphead | StudioMDHR: three people working weekends at first, 20 by mid-2017 | about 7 years, 2010 to 2017 | 29 September 2017 |
| Animal Well | Billy Basso, solo, on an engine he wrote himself | about 7 years, from 2017 | 9 May 2024 |
- Stardew Valley. Barone did the design, code, art, music and writing himself. “On average, I probably worked on it 10 hours a day every day of the week during development,” he told Game Developer in 2016, and the whole cycle came to about four and a half years, per his Wikipedia biography.
- Cuphead. Chad and Jared Moldenhauer started it in 2010 as a three-person team working weekends, with a scope of a few bosses and a couple of weapons. After the E3 2015 demo they went back to the bigger plan: “My brother and I quit our jobs, remortgaged our houses and began expanding the team,” Chad told GamesRadar+. The studio had 20 people by mid-2017, and the game shipped that September.
- Animal Well. Basso began in 2017 and built it in C++ without an existing engine. After four years he brought in Dan Adelman for marketing, and a year later Bigmode signed it as its first published game (Wikipedia).
- Hollow Knight. Its hero first appeared in Hungry Knight, a Ludum Dare 2013 jam game by Team Cherry’s Ari Gibson and William Pellen. Hollow Knight went to Kickstarter in November 2014, and the campaign let the team hire technical director David Kazi, composer Christopher Larkin, and marketing and publishing manager Matthew Griffin. It kept adding stretch-goal content after an engine switch from Stencyl to Unity, going from a 2013 game jam idea to a February 2017 release (Wikipedia).
Four things move the number more than anything else:
- Team size. With one or two people, code, art, sound and design run one after another instead of side by side.
- Hours. Two years of full-time work and two years of evenings both count as two years in development, and they produce very different amounts of game.
- Scope. A single-mechanic game ships far sooner than a world with hundreds of interactions. Cuphead’s timeline grew when its scope did.
- Experience. A first game pays for learning the engine and building a pipeline. A second game reuses both, which is why a team’s first game usually takes longer than its second.
A game-jam project or a tiny arcade game can be finished in weeks, the way PEAK’s core was. A polished commercial release usually takes years, as all three games in the table did.
What does this look like from inside a small studio?
We are Overbaked Studio, a small, independent game studio founded in Istanbul in 2026, working across genres rather than in one. We are building two games: Grandma Left Me a Building, a cozy apartment management sim, and Hellmate - Chess Deck Builder, a roguelike deckbuilder. Both are unreleased: Steam lists Grandma Left Me a Building for 10 November 2026 and Hellmate for 19 January 2027 (as of October 2026).
Nothing in the data above promises us anything. What it shows is that the route exists and what it costs: years of iteration, a specific hook, a Steam page up early, and discovery earned through community. That is why we publish design breakdowns like how we designed Grandma Left Me a Building and keep our material public on the game’s press page. We will share real numbers when we have them, the same standard we hold everyone else to in this post.
Frequently asked questions
Can one person make a video game? Yes. Every game in the first table above started as one person’s work, and the pattern holds across genres and across a decade of releases. What a solo developer gives up is speed and breadth, because design, code, art, audio and support all land on the same desk.
How long does it take one person to make a game? Four and a half to seven years for the solo hits on this page with a public timeline: Barone on Stardew Valley and Basso on Animal Well. Many also had earlier games behind them. Zeekerss had been making Roblox games since 2012 before Lethal Company broke through.
Can one person make a game in a year? Yes, if the game is small. Luca Galante’s first early access version of Vampire Survivors took about a year, per Wikipedia. A commercial solo project with a large world is another matter: Stardew Valley took Eric Barone about four and a half years at roughly ten hours a day.
How much money do indie games make on Steam? More than a quarter of Steam’s 2025 revenue went to indie games, per Alinea Analytics (checked October 2026). Almost none of it reaches the typical release, though: of about 20,000 games released on Steam in 2025, only about 300 grossed a million dollars or more, so a platform-wide share predicts nothing about a single game.
Key takeaways
- Indie games accounted for more than a quarter of Steam’s revenue in 2025, per Alinea Analytics (checked October 2026).
- Stardew Valley (over 50 million copies), Balatro (5 million in under a year), Lethal Company (an estimated 10 million), Undertale, and Animal Well were each made by one person.
- Free engines, Steam’s open distribution, small-team publishers like Playstack, Bigmode, and Devolver, and creator-driven discovery are the structural enablers.
- Survivorship bias is real: about 20,000 games hit Steam in 2025, and only about 300 grossed $1 million or more, per Alinea Analytics.
- Most of the winners with a public timeline took years: four and a half to seven for every game in this post’s schedule table.
If you want to watch a small studio try this in public, you can wishlist Grandma Left Me a Building on Steam.
