The Results I Woke Up To

The night all three games were built and published, there was nothing left to do but go to sleep and see what happened. The next morning brought the numbers back.

Blockfield, the block-world shooter, had almost 4,000 players overnight — with no promotion at all. It wasn't posted anywhere, no ads ran, and barely anyone was told it existed. Players found it entirely on their own through the marketplace listing and started playing, with as many as 22 people at once in the same arena, building, fighting, and talking in a game that had been described in a single sentence the day before.

The second number is the more telling one: 121 people didn't just play Blockfield, they remixed it. Each one opened the game, changed something, and shipped their own version. That's 121 separate moments of someone looking at what got built and deciding they could build on it too — turning one project into 121 derivative ones with a single click each.