How Do Tiny Teams Make Huge Games? The Micro-Studio Era
Updated August 3, 2026
By Emre Şahiner, game designer at Overbaked Studio. Last verified August 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 earned about $4.4 billion on Steam in 2025, a quarter of the platform’s revenue. Here is what makes that possible, and what the numbers leave out.
How much money do small indie games actually make?
In 2025, indie games generated about $4.4 billion on Steam, roughly 25% of the platform’s $17.7 billion in game revenue for the year, according to Alinea Analytics. The top five new indie releases alone earned over $500 million combined: Schedule I ($151 million), R.E.P.O. ($147 million), PEAK ($87 million), Hollow Knight: Silksong ($75 million), and Escape from Duckov ($53 million).
The team sizes behind those numbers are the interesting part. Schedule I was built by one developer, Tyler of TVGS in Sydney, who only started hiring after the game topped Steam’s sales charts. Hollow Knight: Silksong comes from Team Cherry, a three-person studio in Adelaide. 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 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 | unannounced | over 1 million copies within months of its early-2022 breakout | poncle, the developer |
| 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 passed 41 million copies by December 2024 and topped 50 million 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 while unemployed, spending about 1,100 GBP on art and music asset packs. Within a few months of its early-2022 breakout it had sold over a million copies, per its developer poncle.
- 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 in Sydney and a three-person team in Adelaide 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 went from obscurity to a million sales after a SplatterCat video kicked off its breakout. 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. More than 19,000 games released on Steam in 2025 by SteamDB’s count, and nearly half of them received fewer than ten user reviews, per GameDiscoverCo’s analysis. VG Insights found that over half of indie games on Steam never gross more than $4,000. The same Alinea Analytics report that counted $4.4 billion noted that just five releases produced 3% of Steam’s entire annual game revenue. 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. The winners also took their time. Barone spent over four years, Basso seven, Tyler of TVGS three, and Zeekerss had been shipping small games since 2012, a decade before Lethal Company. We broke down realistic schedules in how long it takes to make an indie game.
What does this look like from inside a small studio?
We are Overbaked Studio, a small independent studio founded in Istanbul in 2026: game designer Emre Şahiner, 2D artist Berkay Özer, developers Batuhan Adımlı and İrem Akkılık, and Umut Altıntaş on sales and marketing. 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 and in development.
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 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? Three to seven years, judging by the ones with a public timeline. Barone spent over four years on Stardew Valley and Basso seven on Animal Well, and several of these developers had been shipping smaller games for years before the one that broke through.
How much money do indie games make on Steam? About $4.4 billion across all indie games on Steam in 2025, per Alinea Analytics. Almost none of it reaches the median game, though: over half of indie titles never gross $4,000 by VG Insights’ count, so a platform-wide total predicts nothing about a single release.
Key takeaways
- Indie games earned about $4.4 billion on Steam in 2025, roughly 25% of the platform’s game revenue, per Alinea Analytics.
- 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: more than 19,000 games hit Steam in 2025, nearly half drew fewer than ten reviews per GameDiscoverCo, and over half of indies never gross $4,000, per VG Insights.
- The consistent trait among the winners is time: three to seven years of iteration before launch.
If you want to watch a small studio try this in public, you can wishlist Grandma Left Me a Building on Steam.
