A new breed of “micro-indie” publisher is emerging: teams that fund sub-$200K games, ship fast, and treat releases like a portfolio. In this episode, host Alexandra Takei, VP at Medal, sits down with Kirill Akimkin, founder of Polden Publishing, to unpack the world of micro indies and discovery. In 2025, they shipped almost 8 games with $800K and plan to ship 20 titles in 2026. Kirill explains that much of their developer pipeline is inbound: a Telegram-led media presence brings developers to them, and that they are more “researchers” than experts, with strict KPIs for a game's release. We discuss their genre strategy, developer strategy, and more.
The conversation then turns to discovery, both outside Steam and building towards the Steam algorithm for wishlists. Kirill frames marketing as a repeatable machine: short-form content, creators, and community spikes are used to drive consistent wishlist velocity, which then feeds Steam’s surfaces (Discovery Queue, Popular Upcoming, demo visibility, and post-launch recommendations) and the duo discuss case studies of Fish Hunters, Totally Secure Airport (which got 75K+ wishlists in on day), and Final Sentance.
They close with questions on where discovery happens, what today’s games in micro indies indicate about modern-day gamers’ tastes, and the perception of AI in low-budget titles. If you are shipping a PC game on Steam this year, this is a must-listen.
We’d like to thank Medal.tv for making this episode possible. If you're a PC gamer and want to clip your moments or a studio, publisher, or marketer looking to reach a high-quality gaming audience and get your game in front of the right players, check out all Medal has to offer at https://grow.medal.tv.
This transcript is machine-generated, and we apologize for any errors.
Alexandra: What's up everyone? And welcome to the Naavik Gaming Podcast. I'm your host, Alex, and this is the Interview and Insight segment. Today we're diving into the world of a new breed of publisher trying to solve discovery and the world of micro indies where micro, indie, indie and III and AA and AAA, they, it's not really a real line, but for the sake of today's discussion, we're chatting about games that are probably sub 200 K in development costs, but that can garner hundreds of Ks of wishlists. There are a few publishers in this space and they're, that are focusing on smaller budget games with a rapid release strategy.
And this is important because all the cost of development might be cheaper. These studios and teams have access to the same distribution systems and consumers as everyone else. In a way, you might say that these publishers invest in games like a stock manager builds their investment portfolio. Strict KPI requirements, wide genre exposure, aka diversification, and quickly divest and abandon losers if early signals or launches go south.
But the cool thing about this breed of publisher is it's capitalizing on a trend of fun bite-sized systems-based design. Chooses games with marketing and community in mind from the very beginning, and maybe think less about the longevity of the game over years and years, but more about weeks of viral momentum, enough to return the development costs before moving on to the next title.
My guest today, to help me discuss this new space on air, is Kirill Akimkin, founder at Polden Publishing. Polden started as an agency but evolved from an agency into the micro indie publisher it is today. As Kirill says, they are more researchers than experts and his two other co-founders and him grew the team from three to thirty-five in four months.
Kirill is based in Spain, but many of the team is based in Cyprus. Welcome to the show.
Kirill: Yeah. Hello. Hello.
Alexandra: Awesome. So I'm really excited to dive into the meat of the show. Kirill, I want to know, especially given you've been playing around in really small budget arena for games for a while now, like how you feel personally as a gamer playing a title like Cozy Football Story versus a big budget game, and what makes you passionate about this particular space of games?
Kirill: So, yeah, for me, I think there was no big difference lifetime in the games. So, you can play AAA and with the same passion and maybe even more you can play the indie games. So, for me, there is no big difference. Maybe there is only one problem that you, that there are not that many games, indie games, on a consoles, so you can do this on a sofa. But in general, I think it's, for me, it's the same. No, no difference.
Alexandra: Got it.
Kirill: And even in the case of the story in game design, I think indie games, of course, yeah, it's the, the much more better than the more of the AAA studios.
Alexandra: Yaeh, definitely
Kirill: This freedom and this indie soul.
Alexandra: Yeah. It's funny. I was watching a, like a TikTok reel the other day of a guy that was like, it was like the compare contrast, like playing, playing a billion, a billion dollar game made by 800 devs by your AAA guy. He like takes the headphones off, like tosses the controller away and then it's like playing a game for four hours that was $9 made by three random dudes in a basement. And it was like, changed my life, made me ask questions about my human existence. And I think that that's actually quite powerful. Yeah, I think that definitely some AAA games have made me do that, but I have found that like a lot of the indie world, like a game like Gris, really like, I don't know, made me question things and think more thoughtfully about like the world. But not to say that AAA games can't do that. I'm a, I'm a big fan of other games that do that, but I was just curious if you had a particular passion for this space.
Kirill: That was unique. No, but yeah, no, and I'm happy with it. Yeah, I'm happy with it.
Alexandra: All right. Much more interesting to you is not the game side, but maybe the, the, the publishing strategy and, and the fun rollup, et cetera. So, we'll kind of maybe start there in the publishing strategy, which is kind of like from sourcing to shipping. And so, I wanna begin with where you started, you know, after the agency switched to being a publisher, I think in 2025 you mentioned that you got 800K for eight games, which is basically about 100K per game.
And you shipped all of those eight games in one year, and the original investor reinvested another 800K the next year in 2026. And now this year you're planning to build 20 games. I know you're also planning to fundraise near the end of this year. But first tell me like, where does the pipeline for all of these games come from?
Kirill: Basically I think we just invented pipeline for ourself. So, there was no, nothing shared with us from the gut that said that you need to do this, this, and this. So, in basically all what we doing, it was the, the part of the experiment and our research, so basic pipeline is the, not the scouting, let's say, because we get all the games organically from the, our social media account. So, there were no scouting part. And after we, they just went through the production chain from the close play test, open play test, demo, some festival, and some intermediate marketing bits. And, of course, the release. So, the basic pipeline is something like this.
Alexandra: That's fascinating. So, I mean, but, but in a way you have really built up a really big social media presence so that people know to apply for your pipeline.
Kirill: Yeah. So, there is some power of, let's say, of the region, of the language, because my co-founders, we obviously speak Russian a lot.
Alexandra: Mm-hmm.
Kirill: Cause we're originally from Russia, and they have, let's say two biggest, uh, Telegram channel, in Russian language about how we build the publishing. And it's actually started in Telegram before we raise anybody.
So, we have nothing on our hands. And we started this reality show. So now we dream, at least we dream about the publishing. And after it became a reality, and we started reality show with this, let's say, transparent approach, and as you mentioned before, we're not expert, we're researchers. So, everything we found working, we just share and say, this is the numbers, this is the loss, it works, or it doesn't work. So, we still keep on this direct.
Alexandra: Yeah. I think the thing, the comment though that I, at least I find to be interesting about, at least, you know, having sat in the seat of being an investor in games content before, like finding the high-quality team was hard. Whereas it sounds like for you guys, finding the high-quality team, like you basically sit back and people come to you guys to ask for things, which is, I think, the ideal situation.
But you may have established through this really niche of basically specific language, I guess concentration, plus Telegram, which is sort of how it began for you. And now obviously you've established a brand, and you've been rolling over time, but I was more just curious because, you know, I think it's challenging sometimes to find high quality teams that are gonna make great products.
And I assume that you still wanna make fun games without kind of, with just sitting back and, and not lifting a finger.
Kirill: Yeah, of course. For, for the first year it was just enough to get these, let's say, organic games or studios we have, but it's more about the brand here is we have the big presence in the Russian Telegram network, so everyone see that probably they're good guys and they have money, so why not to try and…
Alexandra: Right, of course. Yeah. Excellent. I mean, it's very simple at the end of the day, like.
Kirill: Yeah, we're lucky because they put trust on us because we have zero games in our portfolio. And they say, okay, we trust in you, and of course we are happy with this. And I, as I think almost all games paid off, so there should be no problem for the developers.
So, they put trust, we come back with the revenue. So, it's a win-win situation. And for the next year, of course, yeah, we won't be able to keep this speed on the organic outreach, organic project. So, we need to expand this funnel and there will be more different regions like the Southeast, maybe some Europe teams will come up.
So yeah, let's see. So anyway, we'll do this brand marketing for the English in, in English language, and we'll try to expand because right now it was just the beginning. We used the power of the native language, and we get some decent teams. It's, it's very good guys, all of them. And now we need to expand, and I think there will be the huge new page with the polls in, in the content presence on YouTube, et cetera.
Alexandra: Excellent. For these developers, do you ever face challenges with speed and quality when trying to push so many games out the gate?
Kirill: Actually no, because when we did the agreement, we discussed the milestones and we said, guys, so no pressure. We have this amount of money, you have this amount of time, so let's try to collaborate.
If we need to cut off something, let's prioritize, let's discuss. So for us, we, we, we're not the AAA publisher. We can dictate what to do. We can only negotiate and copyright with them. So, it's mostly very friendly relationship with the developers. Okay. So, if the, there was a problem during the development, obviously almost, which with every game.
But when we, when you have the result of the play test, when you have this questionnaire is player's feedback, you can prioritize it properly. And I think nobody argue with us that, no, we should not do this. When you see the scores, when you see the player feedback, you decide what to do, what to not. And we can only highlight where the problem is. But basically, if it's within the budget, within the timeline, we are okay with it.
Alexandra: And we'll talk a little bit about like the economics and sort of like what you're doing for the studios in the partnership in a moment, but still focusing on kind of like the funnel side. You guys, like where does the idea, the game idea get its legs?
Are you the publisher like hiring a team to build forklift simulator, or do the teams come to you with the ideas already? I mean, I guess, and this is a question because I think for most publishers, you know, they're facing a bunch of different inbound from different genres of different kinds of games on different platforms.
And you guys have this really like broad kind of shotgun approach. Are you like looking for games that you're like, we have to have one sim, we have to have one shooter, we have to have one, and then you kind of go out and assign that? Or is it like, if the team is good, you'd be happy to build four, you'd happy to build all eight simulator games?
Kirill: Yeah. Great question. So, basically for the first batch, for the first games, we just, sort what we have from the inbox. So, there was different games. There was an LTS game, like Masine inspired game. It's a very hard genre, but we need to try it. There was a simulator, which is, which I think it's a very great genre in Steam because we have this supermarket or this kind of simulator, kebab, supermarket or whatever, and it feels great on Steam. So maybe there is a lot of money there. We have this cozy football story. We have the cooking simulator. It's like the Overcooked with the rats mix, so we take everything and see how it goes. The only fail we have is with the puzzle games, and it's really very challenging because the puzzle games right now, if it's not with a stunning visual or idea, I dunno, this 3D puzzle with the photo or what you can see in the TikTok, I think it very hard to promote.
So, for our train ready game, it, it was the fail, but also we just took this risk we discuss with developers. So, we put the money, we didn't get them back. So, no problem. So, it's a portfolio. We have a lot of games, some will fail. So, nothing personal. We did what we, what we could did.
Alexandra: Okay.
Kirill: For this game.
Alexandra: And so, you are acting in a very traditional publisher manner where someone comes to you, the game studios come to you with the idea usually.
Kirill: Yeah, yeah. The idea comes from the studio. But there was, to be honest, in this bunch for the 2026, there was, let's say some sort of the game gem in Telegram.
Again, when we say that we're looking for the friend slope games or games, which looks like Final Sentence. So, when you have the single scene, and you do something with the physics, with the cards, with the, something like Bilateral Cover, Repeat, Final Sentence. And we just did this, there was like 100 of the prototypes. I think we played like 30 or 40 games, and I think we take only one from them 'cause there was too early to roll. But sometimes we give some direction and say, guys, if you can do something interesting with this mechanic we're in, so just, do it for us. Got it. No problem.
Alexandra: Okay. I see. Alright.
Kirill: But it's not in-house development. We just said that there was an idea.
Alexandra: Yeah.
Kirill: And if you want, we can fund it, and we will go 50-50 after. So, we'll not hire you as an employee and just doesn't share royalty with you.
Alexandra: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Okay, that makes a lot of sense. And maybe that brings us to, before I wanna talk about two things before we kind of talk about discovery and the performance of your portfolio.
And those two things are definitely basically the testing pipeline and also how it kind of works between at the micro, in the micro indie-an machine publishing scene. Like what does the publishing deal look like for game tips. And so for the studio, you kind of mentioned just now 50-50, how does the economics usually work out for them and what do you guys do for the studio to support the, the launch or the development?
Kirill: Yeah. For studio, first of all, we doing funding, if the project needs funding, because sometimes there is project that don't need money. They need only marketing. In this case we'll go 70-30, but in the traditional case it's 50-50 and we do the producing. So, we have the, as a producer or right now, we have some new guys who can do this.
We do the community management, we do the localization stuff. We do the quality assurance. And right now, everything is inside the ING because in first year we need to outsource it. There is a lot, a lot of micromanagement stuff and you need to find the proper partners. So, it's very tricky. So, we decided to go fully in-house and so since this year we have all this community content production.
So, if you need TikTok, reels, trailer, all this stuff, if you need localization, we will do it in-house. Of course, localization, localization manager will be from ing, but the partners will be from the outsourcing studio because we can't hold 10 different native speakers in our publishing. But yeah, in general, we do everything from idea to release and of course we do the post-release support.
We support the community for some time, depends on the revenue of the game and, and it's community. Alive or not. We do the, all the discount stuff, bundles, everything we can do on Steam and of course daily deal, free weekend, all this stuff.
Alexandra: Okay. Got it. So, in a way, you're a very traditional publisher, you are just operating at a really tiny scale, and so you're just everything. Costs all just go down.
Kirill: Maybe the only difference we have is the approach for the play test and the testing in general, because we strongly believe that the good game should have, I dunno, at least 40 minute of million play time across the 2000 players, for example.
And it should have great scores, like 90% of scores should be four and five in surveys. Yeah. And we do this each play test. So, for the, each build we create the questionary on type, form, whatever, or goal form. And we do this stuff with the how do you feel about the game mechanics, number one. Number two, what's your overall score? What you're thinking about the visual style, where did you come from? Sometimes it's, help us to understand the source of the traffic. For example, if it's TikTok or the France, so it, it depends. And we trying to increment each play test, the scores. If we see that there is a lot of three scores, of course we need to iterate one more.
And usually, it takes one close play test and one open play test to get to the demo with the decent median and the decent reviews from the players. Okay. But it's, let's say, let's name it data driven approach when you look at the game like a product, and you do this whole customer development stuff and you need to build a shape for it here.
Alexandra: Yeah, that makes sense. Okay. And I'd love to ask a couple questions kind of about this KPI focused and driven play testing, I guess, methodology that you guys have. The games dev cycles are, are fairly short as you've mentioned. You're saying for a lot of them, right. They're not, you know, multiple years of development. When in the development pipeline. on average, do you get them into hands for testing, like how many months?
Kirill: You mean how many months, till the playable build?
Alexandra: Yes, exactly. So like how fast, if it's a six-month development cycle or an eight-month development cycle, when is the, when is the date that you start testing?
Kirill: I think two, three months is two, three months is enough. Yeah, usually. But earlier anyway, we receive the game user and document, and we can pass it to the QA so they can build the, let's say the preview document. Preview of the test plan. So yeah. Anyway, the work start a bit earlier, but in general, yeah.
So, if it's a one-year pipeline, I think in three months we will get internal testing. In four months, it'll be an open test because as soon as we try to do the community play testing or player, or I don't know how Steam play test as much earlier as we can. Because we need the feedback from the not biased.
Alexandra: Got it. Audience. Okay. So, you're putting this pressure on, on these teams to say, Hey, like you're at a place where you can test now, we're gonna test now, don't wait and—
Kirill: Yeah, yeah. Kind of.
Alexandra: Yeah.
Kirill: Each game has the same problem. Developers overcomplicate the things they think it's too easy. We need to do it much more harder and much more hardcore.
And we see in the surveys that Please do it a bit lighter. Yeah. Yeah. And, and so we need to do this reality check earlier for the, because our, we don't, we can say that we're an expert and we say not to do this thing. We prefer, prefer to provide the players feedback. Maybe it's 100, maybe 1000 of the responses.
And say, guys, I think this is the right choice, because we are not relevant. We are not this fan of the genre, we're not the expert in game design, so we can only rely on the count and the responses.
Alexandra: Okay. How do you ensure when you play test that the test is indicative of live performance? And I ask this because on the studio side, as also has been my experience, many people who want to play in those play tests are already biased towards liking the project.
So, the scores biased towards, at least in my experience, favorable. What are you guys doing to ensure that like these testers are like going to be really critical and give honest feedback versus I found the game through Steam, I've been following the game for a while. I'm a big fan of these, this type of thing in the first place. Therefore, here's my positive feedback.
Kirill: Yeah. To be honest, I'm not sure that we have this type of audience on Steam because most of them are, will be very aggressive.
Alexandra: Ah, yeah.So over there not good. They're like, this game is crap.
Kirill: Yeah. Yeah. Maybe in a cozy genre there will be more positive, polite people.
Yeah. In the average, even in simulator niche, there is no polite people. They say that it's piece of crap, you need to redo everything from scratch. But I will go with the four score. So not that bad.
Alexandra: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Kirill: Okay. Yeah. In general, it's, I think, it's the critical point. So, once we release the Steam page, when it's go live and receive this UL, we always enable a request access button on Steam.
It's, it allows you to get play testers as soon as possible. The play test came from the Steam itself. So, it's not by, we don't know who they are. We don't know where they came from. It's just the, the same people who wish the game. So probably it's the target audience. And once you have this button, I think till the, if you do some, you can buy some traffic on Reddit and say that we try to play test the game. Please sign up if you don't have enough play tester. But usually if you do this, announce for the game and the request button was in place, I think there will be five, 7,000 of play testers waiting for the access. And you can do this limited play test with the 1000 now, 2000 later.
So, when got you, get this, so we don't know who is playing the game. We just see the numbers of the team, and we don't know who they're at all. And of course, this year I think we'll be expanding to the external platform because there are some new platforms on the market who allow us to play test, to do this additional analytics sign NGA of this stuff.
But right now, and I think for the most of the indies and maybe for the most of the publisher, this template test feature is more than enough to get at least iteration and get this decent median play time.
Alexandra: Yeah, that's fascinating actually. As you know, we, I've had the founder of First Look on the show before, and they've done a ton of stuff with play testing.
And at the studio before we were definitely using First Look and not using Steam’s play testing 'cause, and so our volume and our people came from signing up directly with us versus through Steam. But I see the benefit actually of having that Steam because, because then you have the audience on Steam, which probably translates to a wishlist audience, which we'll talk about in a second, which is really interesting. But before we move on to game performance and discovery and sort of like your strategy for driving discovery outside of Steam, what do you hope to see in your future pipeline? Do you need to see the quality of developer or ideas go up for the next 20 games in 2026, or are you really happy and satisfied with sort of how the portfolio is going right now?
Kirill: I can say that we're happy because we have what we have. We're not that critical. But, of course, there is a space for growth always. And our internal goal, it's not mentioned anywhere, and we are not doing anything right now, but we want to have this kind of the art director guy in the studio and maybe some game designer inside the podium who can overlook the whole portfolio.
Because sometimes the indie studio is really small. It's like three, four people or even two people, and they don't have game designer. They don't have the guys who is in charge for art. And even, I dunno, two-hour session may set the right direction for the whole game 'cause I'm not sure even that the UI and UX designer exist in the gaming, especially in the Indie.
So maybe if we will have this in Polden, we can share the expertise between the projects. And the overall quality will be much more higher. So, there is a dream of it, but yeah. Right now, we need some cash before and we can hire this guy who can overlook the whole portfolio. Yeah, because—
Alexandra: Makes sense.
Kirill: The visual is the kink of course. And we need to try to improve it in every sense the in the teams or inside Polden.
Alexandra: Makes sense. Yeah. Okay. Like a shared internal UI resource or UX resource. Alright. Okay, so now that we have a really strong understanding of sort of like where your pipeline comes from, how you evaluate them, how you get them into testing you very strict KPI performance targets, et cetera, scores four and five are above. I wanna talk about discovery in your strategy outside of Steam and then, for wishlists on Steam 'cause some of your titles have gotten mega wishlist counts in a day, weeks, et cetera. So tell me a little bit about what your current recipe is for driving discovery outside of Steam.
I know that you don't spend any money on influencers, so tell me about what that looks like.
Kirill: Yeah, so the answer is simple as usual. We don't have money so we can’t spend them because the actual marketing budget doesn't allow us to buy any huge streamers. And to be honest, they will be not so beneficial for us.
If we buy, I dunno, a guy with the 20K viewers, it'll provide zero sales probably. So, we can't risk, but in general, our marketing focusing on the influence and short form content, and now it's, it works previous in 2025. And I think it'll work even better in 2026 because there are some new services that allows you to buy creators.
It's like the crater marketplace. There were before, but now we find the working one, and I think it will increase the spending on the influencer directly. So, we will pay, but uh, we are picking this year because we can't afford YouTube or Twitch campaign because it's the, it's too much money, even more than we spend on a game.
And in case of the influencer, influencer outreach, we do it like, in a startups, there is email marketing, and we do basically the same, but we don't try to cover the all influencers on the tweet. We always try to find the perfect 500 on 1,000 creators who we want, and we automate only the sending and delivery part.
So, it's the basic email chain. When you have this text, we divided the, into the smaller group to make it personalized. So, if you play our game, you will receive one message. If you didn't play any our game, you received the first message. If you played, this demo of the, of the game, of course there will be another message.
So, try to do this very, let's say cozy and warm. And we only automate the delivery part 'cause it's, it's a hell when you need to send 1000 emails.
Alexandra: Yeah.
Kirill: And technology helps. Yeah. But we don't want to do like 10,000, uh, creators for beat. No, no, no. It's a very small batch and we try to target our, let's say, audience in case of the short videos.
Yeah. It's a kink right now, we do all the announces with the short videos. Of course, the different games respond differently, but the airport case there is the last announce from the podium got extremely viral. I think today it's 200,000 wishlists.
Alexandra: Oh, wow. Less than two weeks. Okay. My, like my, my, my data from point from last week is inaccurate now.
Kirill: Yeah. Yeah. It's two, 202. We, less than two weeks. So, it's the, it's a very good number for us. And the previous one was that hikers, which is 101 months. So, it's very good. But, yeah. And generally, yeah, the short video, I think is a kink because, when you have this algorithmic feed, you can go far above your audience.
So, in that, which, for example, you have on the subscribers in the universe and there is no algorithmic feed, and you will never pop up on the random people page and TikTok. Reels, even Facebook shorts. So, I don't know, how do they call them in Facebook? We got one, two, 2 million views on the Facebook recently for that hikers. I don't know where it comes from, but somebody, but somebody's watching.
Alexandra: Yeah.
Kirill: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And yeah, it works perfectly. So, our strategy is to expand this, and we're also building this partnership program in Polden. I think for this year maybe we'll complete it, so we'll try to pay for the post for the mentioning, et cetera.
So, we want to build close relationship with all the creators who do the short form content. And I think it's the only working thing for us right now because the ROI from it, it's, it's high.
Alexandra: Okay. Alright. Bunch of questions. It sounds like social media and short videos are extremely important to you,, which I think is true and endemic across the whole gaming industry.
You manually send a bunch of emails to some curated audience that you've specified, right? These aren't paid influencers, but you're moding dating them in some sort of way so can you share a little bit about how you find the, in the right influencers, right? You just said like, you're not emailing 10,000 of them, but you're emailing the 500-1000 that you think are very unique to the game.
How do you determine who those people are and then sort of what you mentioned some sites that you're working with that can motivate influencers and creators. What sites are those? If they're not Twitch, if they're not YouTube, if they're not TikTok.
Kirill: Yeah, yeah, yeah. About the creators and how do we find them?
So, there is some tool from the guys from Germany. It, it called Contact Tools. It's not public so you can’t find it, but in case somebody need it, they can drop me a message and they link it in. So, I will answer. So, it's some close tool which parts Twitch, YouTube, and we try to find, so always we have, uh, let's say the first list is the one who played our demo.
If we get the coverage from the demo from the influencer, he's always in our list. The second list is the influencer who play the game which looks like our game, for example, for the Bus Flipper simulator, we will cover the most of the influence from the House Flipper from another simulator game.
So, it's the games references and the third list of the creators, it could be the very generic guys who do this stuff, like cheap game alert, like new game announce, et cetera. So, it's the guys who always need the new content. They always looking for the new games, new announcement, and we just send email to them.
So, if you have the upcoming videos and you just receive all the press kit, all the B rolls prepared for the vertical video, feel free to use it. Yeah, we're, we're not against it. We do it for, for you. Yeah. So basically, this is how we work with the creators and, of course, after we filtering on the average viewers, average playtime, average subscribers.
So just to avoid, because there are too much scam on the YouTube and Twitch market, when somebody buys the accounts with the millions of subscribers start uploading some videos. They start scamming for keys through the, through the, all the platforms, which is, which exist even through the email. So, we try to avoid them and try to manage.
So, who are watching the streamer? Is it alive or is it scam channel? But in general, yeah, we have like maybe 20,000 creators in our, let's say internal CRM who we work with.
Alexandra: Got it. Okay. Well, not, and so you're also hosting an internal CRM as well.
Kirill: So, right now it's a very creepy Google. Maybe it'll be soon,
Alexandra: Maybe very Start start. I get it. I know what, I know what it looks like. It looks like Microsoft Excel with some labels, okay.
Kirill: We'll end up with the Microsoft Excel. Yeah. Whatever you are using. Yeah, exactly.
Alexandra: But I think that's really useful and helpful because I think that, you know, from my perspective, this like level of manual labor is just, it's very difficult to scale, and it's really hard to find the people who are the right audience for your game.
And so, you're doing it by three different things. You, like, you showed organic interest, there's a game proxy here. If you liked Forklift Simulator, you may like Supermarket Simulator. Yep. And then, the final one is like, sorry, what was the final one again that you mentioned?
Kirill: It's the gen, general guys who do this type of announcing, the general—
Alexandra: People that are looking for new games at, at all. Right.
Kirill: It's like the entertainment guys or the news channels or something like this.
Alexandra: Right, right. Okay. Yeah. And I think that that's a really good strategy to break down because for a lot of studios that are thinking about how they build discovery, this is kind of a way to, way to tackle it. Okay, so we talked about discovery outside of Steam, which is through content creators.
Now, I wanna talk about the, the wishlist thing on Steam. Last week, you told me that totally secure airport got 75K wishlist in one day, except that we're no longer at 75K. You just mentioned you're like a north of 200K. Which is crazy. What is your current recipe for driving wishlists on Steam and is it any different from the recipe for driving discovery that we just talked about?
Kirill: I think it's, it's close to the discovery outside the Steam. So, once you give the traffic to Steam from the external, the external traffic to Steam, the Steam will give you some organic traffic. So, for us, we need to focus on the announcement. So, there should be a lot of videos, a lot of views, a lot of traffic to the Steam page, which is just announced.
And you need to bring the wishlist to the God of Steam. And as we can see on the Hikers and Totally Secure Airport game, once you have maybe 8K to 10K of wishlists per day, this team start bringing some discovery queue traffic to your page for the Hikers. I think right now something like 35% of the wishlist came from the discovery queue from Steam.
Alexandra: Oh wow. Okay.
Kirill: Decent amount. It's like the third of the wishlist for the Airport, I think for now it's like 25% of the wishlists. It's also the 50k, it's too much. But I think there will be a long sale for maybe next two weeks, and it'll be the same, 30-35%. So, this team is very responsive, and if your game catch the interstate, he start putting a, a random placement.
So, I do ask Steam for this. So, no paid placement. You cannot everything based on the, on the interest and your personal page. So, you will get this even discovery queue or some pop-up banner or more like this section. So, there will be a placement for a game if it's really good. But sometimes, yeah, our games didn't get this much of attention, so we did the same recipe, the same announcement, the same services.
We're using the same short form content, but the amount of wish split is like 10K or 20K, so not that much. And of course there is no traffic from Steam. In this case, at least we can see it. We can distinguish it from the, any external traffic. But here, I think the most working thing for us is the demo 'cause when you do the play test and you slowly going to the demo, you will have this opportunity to send a notification to the guys who wishlist your game. So, if the play test went good, you can also do a marketing with the play test. Sometimes we just share the keys with the creators and say that we have a secret play test and you have the key, you can stream it exclusively.
So, sometimes they stream it and it generate wishlist as well. But, of course, the main push is on the demo. When you have this published version, you publish the demo page and you push the send wishlist notification button on Steam. And here we're waiting for the magic. So, if you will beat 508 hundreds and 800 concurrent players on Steam, you will pop up on the three section.
You will be on the demo sale on the top page. So, they will be organic from Steam. And of course there will be a wishlist for our, let's say casino simulator. It's the game from the 2026. It's not the real casino, no gambling at all. It's just the simulator of the casino. So, we had only 7,000 of wishlists.
So, I'm out very small. And after the play test, there was no wishlist at all. And on the demo when we pushed the button and did this, let's say, TikTok warmup, we got like right now I think it's 20K or 22K of wishlists. So, we got a decent amount of wishlists from the demo. And of course we pop out on the, all the free demo training free sections.
Alexandra: All right, great. But you've mentioned a couple components about Steam here that I think are important to like crystal lies, and the first is maximizing. You are all, basically, this is a Steam algo optimization game for you guys. Yeah. And so the first thing is that you're like thinking about wishlist velocity, which is the number of wishlists that happen for the game per day to spike in the discovery feed, which for one of your games, you know, you said that it was 35% of the wishlist had come from that discovery feed.
Therefore, I mean it's air goth one third is a pretty significant amount. So that was really important. So how do you get the wishlist per day? The second thing that you're talking about is with the demo itself. If you have good demo scores and people playing the demo, you said something over like 800 concurrence, et cetera, then you will also show up in the Steam free demo trending section, which is another section on Steam that you're trying to make use of, and then that will increase discovery for the game as well.
And so I, I say these things mostly because a lot of this is about the Steam algo optimization, and so I'm wondering whether or not your strategy would start to fail if Steam changes its algorithm.
Kirill: Maybe we need just to adapt to it because we're not trying to hack the algorithm. We just use what Steam says to use.
So, he say make great games. We are doing the play testing. We try to increase the median play time. And when you see this CCO graph on the Steam debate, you can see that the people playing the game actually. So, it's not dropping after the half an hour after you release, they keep playing. Right. So, we do what Steam ask. So, no problem for us. We are not trying to hack, we're not trying to
Alexandra: No, it totally makes sense.
Kirill: This algorithm.
Alexandra: Yeah. Yeah. I'm just, I think what I'm distinguishing here is that like it is, if Steam were to change how you were to show up in the discovery feed, and it wasn't driven by wishlist velocity, it was driven by something else, right. That you'd have to potentially change your strategy.
Kirill: Yeah. Yeah, I think easily we ready for any changes. Yeah.
Alexandra: Okay. And that leads actually to my next question, which is what do you think you'd fix about Steam if you could fix anything to make the discovery better?
Kirill: I, it's very tricky question because I'm not even sure that the guys from the team exists. I saw them from the game call. Yeah. I have this t-shirt from Steam. I say, you are real. Probably. You're real. Yeah. But yeah, I think the philosophy of this team is just to make great games. Great. They try not, not try, they not doing any paid placement, so there is no option at Steam that you will go to the front page without the decent amount of wishlist of in or interest to your game.
There is no paid advertisement. There is nothing on Steam, which is not organically. So, I think, as long as this is a strategy of the evolve, I think it's fully okay. And you don't need to adapt to something. You just need to use what you have right now.
Alexandra: Okay.
Kirill: But in general,
Alexandra: So for you, for you no notes, Steam is perfect.
Kirill: In case of discovery queue, I think, yeah. So maybe last year I was not that happy because we didn't get any, let's say, big hit with the wishlists. But to be honest, the game wasn't that great. So maybe this is the problem. You need to be more.
Alexandra: Yeah.
Kirill: You need reality check always. If you see the game that is great and it's got decent amount of wishlist, you think it's okay if the game is bad or the visual is bad, or know any other aspect of the game is not that great.
Alexandra: So, I think, yeah, but I think one thing to note here is that yes, absolutely, without a doubt the product has to stand on its own legs. But you guys have done a pretty demonstrable about amount. To get that good product discovered. And I think that that's a critical thing here is that like if you, if you market a bad product, well obviously nobody's gonna play it, but if you, even if you, if you make a good product, but you don't market it, and you don't win the same algorithm, then your product's not gonna get played.
Yeah. And so, I think that that's something that I just want to call out here.
Kirill: Yeah. There is also one note about this team, because right now I think the most, let's say useless part of this team, unfortunately, is the Next Fest. It's the main festival for the demo, for the indie, it was the main event.
And right now, it's pretty useless because last year we were on the Next Fest with the restaurants, which has like 100K of wishlist, and we got almost nothing from the Next Fest. And we got like four or five games on the Next Fest, and they have pretty the same amount. So, there is no much hope for the Next Fest.
And, of course, there is no much hope for the popular upcoming section right now, because even one year ago or two year ago, there was a huge amount of wishlist in the last hours or days before the release. When you pop up on the main Steam page with, in the popular upcoming section right now, I think there are 20-30 release per day on Thursday, maybe more. And there is no chance to get any traffic before the release. So, this next fest and even other Steam Fest, even thematic, are quite useless right now because of the amount of the games. And I think people just not focusing on them. So, there should be some changes, but Steam mentioned at the Gamescom that they will do more personal fits for it.
Maybe even the popular upcoming session will be redesigned to them in a more personal way. So yeah, I think they're really working on it, or at least we hope for it 'cause right now we just use this so we don't rely on the Next Fest at all.
Alexandra: Okay. That makes sense. Yeah, I, there's so much to unpack there, but we're, I'm gonna, I'll keep us moving along to talking a little bit about the Polden portfolio.
So, I wanna talk about a few of the games that you guys have launched and the specific learnings from them. But before we go there and talk about some of your games specifically, you know, you mentioned that you've kind of aggregated tons of wishlists for some of these titles. Is there any specific regionality trends that you see with capturing these games? And if so, why do you think that about the regions?
Kirill: I think it's quite regular. So, we have the tier one countries. It's, of course, always us, is the number one in sales, at least for India. Second position may be Germany, UK, or even China. And the third is the, some Western Europe, maybe Japan, depends on the genre.
So, the tier one regions still do, I think the dominate like half of the sales is from the U.S., so you always need to do the proper marketing for the U.S. The Latam region I think is very bad in case of the conversion from wishlist to the sales, actually because of the price. Even, even the Russian region.
I think Russian is the third language in Steam. And the sales is not that good because the price is regional. It's way more lower. And even for our games, which is let's say, have some success in Russian speaking countries, there is not that much sales. U.S. is always the first.
Alexandra: Fascinating. Yeah, and I was asking that question mostly because some of your developers are from the Cyprus
Kirill: Western. No. No Region Boost here at all.
Alexandra: No Region boost, no in-house region. Boost for your own geography, which is interesting. Okay, so you've shipped about seven to eight games on Steam so far. I could have that number wrong, but it's in that range. I think Phish hunters, Restaurant Rats or something like that. Ria, Static Dread, Bus Flipper, which we've mentioned, Train Valley, Oranges, something about cleaning a garage. And all these games are under 25 bucks. You've announced a few demos for the House Always Wins. And I think Meow, Meow Geek, is that right?
Kirill: Meow the case. Like yap Yap.
Alexandra: But with the kids now, yeah, exactly. It's like yap. Yap. And you mentioned in some of your posts that you know, like X or Y game is like Lethal Company or it's like Yap Yap. As you just mentioned, given that you are researchers, right, tell me what informed making some of those games specifically and is it, and does it go any deeper than Yap Yap was popular so we are making something similar to Yap. Yap. Is there any more nuance than that?
Kirill: Yeah. In case of the magic, I think it's still not announced, but maybe for the, when the podcast will be recorded, it'll be announced properly. We just didn't announce because of the yappy app release and we say, oh, we have the same game.
Let's try to get some traffic on this. And we got, I don't know, 7,000 of wishlists. So not that much, but it's better than zero. Yeah. But the, originally, the team came to us and say that we saw the Yap Yap success and we want to do the more, let's say, cozy version because the Yap Yap was like a horror and they say we want to target more, let's say not the horror audience, but more, let's say girls cozy or play with the kids.
And we say that, of course, why not? The budget was not that high. It was like the 60K. So, say why not? It's a good experiment. So, they have this positioning different from the Yap, it's like the cats magic and some platforming. So, it's not a hardcore game, it's not scary game. So, we decided we need to, at least, we need to try because again, we are looking at our venture capital when you have risks and it, it may be the risk, it may not, so it may pay off, it may, may not. So, no problem for us. If there will be fails, it's okay. It's totally okay. We're researchers. Yeah. But the game, yeah, it was cheap, quite cheap. It's, it should be not that hard in the marketing, and I think at least it'll pay off or maybe get some cash. If not, no problem at all.
Alexandra: Okay.
Kirill: But the strategy was easier. It's, it's the same because the genre is a bit warmed up before us, and maybe some people will try to look to the less scary game to play with girlfriend or with mom or with brother. So, we'll try to target them. And for the little company, like you mentioned, it's the projectors.
It's also, the little company is a unbelievable project to be honest. It's, it's too, it's too good to be true. And of course it's, now it's the whole genre of little company like, and we got the enthusiast who played a lot of in little company, and they want to build this like maybe you see the concept in the Roblox when they have the different doors leading to the different dimension with this mysteries and some strange artifact. And they wanted to build this chaos and, but we decide again, why not? The game going pretty great. We had the great median playtime. It's like 90 minutes. It's a very good median for the game. And there was a play test version also went very good. So, I think it'll also, it'll not be a fail, at least right now, I can see that we are not looking for the, let's say, high amount of money this, because we can see that the wishlist not grow rapidly like Totally Secure Airport.
So, it will be the average project, no problem. We will get some money, we will pay it to developers, and we'll start something new because they already have a huge expertise and maybe the next game from them will be the heat, who knows? Yeah. So, our strategy, I think need to mention that we're looking for heat.
We did the first year, no heat, but we received the, we get the final sentence, probably the medium sized heat. So, it will give some money for us to outlive the second year in this year we got the Totally Secure Airport. And it may be the heat, but if not, I think the third year may be the last for us, because the publisher leaves until you find the heat you need to find your game, which will, compensate the next 10 years of the existence of the publishing.
Yeah. And for us, the more we iterate, the more tries we have, the more chances that we get this heat.
Alexandra: Absolutely. Makes sense. Okay. So, I mean, but that it is that, so it's like you're, like you said, you said there's a genre that's already been warmed up for us and then we're looking to do something, but like slightly with a twist, so like Yap Yap, but less scary for this other person. And those are the hypothesis that you're testing. Before we kind of go to our conclusion and closing questions, I wanna talk about two specific games, because I thought they were interesting and worth mentioning. The, the first is Fish Hunters, and the second is Final Sentence.
So, Fish Hunters, you said had a really high number of wishlists, about 70K, and a pretty high conversion rate around like 30K. But you said also a 20% refund rate. And so, like what kind of went wrong there with that launch, and sort of like, and that game and how are you learning from it?
Kirill: Yeah. For Fish Hunters, I think there was less wishlist.
It's like 30K or 35K, so not that much. But the conversion rate was great. It's above the million, so it's already paid off to be honest. But the, the funding was not that big as you may expect. But the congressional rate was great, I think because of the co-op, because of the fine visual and maybe because of the, some key art.
And we did, of course, the short form media support that was on the release, and there was a lot of streamers because it's funny when you have this fishing game in a funny style, but with the guns, with some funny music AI generated unfortunately. But we did a disclosure, but everyone hate us anyway. Yeah.
Alexandra: Is that the source of the refund rate then you think?
Kirill: No, I think the source of the refund rate is the bugs. Okay. And the bugs, killed the organic traffic from Steam because once you get the mix of reviews, you get out smart going down the new, new and trending section from Steam and start getting less traffic from Steam.
Alexandra: Okay.
Kirill: But yeah, the problem of this game, I think is the bugs. Of course, but it's expected result for us because the game originally was about the fishing and hunting. And when we did the play test, exactly what we mentioned before at the play test, we see that the median playtime was like 14 minutes.
It's like too low. And we start iterating. And we didn't find the core game play because on the second play test it was like 19 minutes. So, it's still below the benchmark, and developer decide to do a pvo and he started doing this more like a sandbox experience with some building blocks, et cetera.
And it was, again, not funny. And after we end up with some idler mechanic, when you need to fish, you get the fish, you get the money, you buy the auto automatons for it, some goms, some two rails who shooting fish for you. And this one works. But of course, when you change the whole core of the game in the middle of the development, it'll provide some bug and some caveats for you.
And when we were releasing, we know that there is some bug. There were some not obvious bugs, like the people cannot connect to the lobby without the mic. I don't know where it came from, but yeah, we just take a decision that we need to release it even with the bug, because developer is very tired of it. We also tired because the product should be released one year ago.
Alexandra: Oh, okay. Yeah.
Kirill: It's like, like fun.
Alexandra: You're like, put it out boys. Doesn't matter.
Kirill: Bugs or no bugs.
Alexandra: It’s going out.
Kirill: It'll be mixed. Okay. We're okay with it. It'll paid off. Great. Not okay. We just closed the cap. So, the, the, the main, let's say lesson was just how to make it to the release.
Alexandra: Yeah.
Kirill: How to this.
Alexandra: But I think there's even another lesson that's buried in there, which is you're comfortable as point if publishing a game that has mixed reviews, right. You're like, there's no gonna, there's not gonna be this catastrophic brand reckoning impact for us. Right. And I think that that's actually something.
That in the micro indie scene that I think a lot of publishers are super afraid of doing anything that's kind of not perfect. And for you guys, you were like, look, we know it's bad, we're gonna get it out. It's not gonna be our best work, but this is why and it's gonna be all okay.
Kirill: Yeah, we see the, so you can always refund, first of all, if you see that the game is buggy, you can play, feel free to refund.
If you want to write a negative review, we will try to reply on it. So, I think our community guys always reply to the negative reviews, and we try to fix it in the first week, first month. So, games always will be fixed. So, we will get the experience you want. But yeah, anyway, the negative, negative or mixed review is the part of the process.
You can’t build the perfect game for everyone. Of course, it's better when you have 90-plus like other our games, but it's not a catastrophe for us at all.
Alexandra: Yeah. Yeah. Alright. And then lastly, let's talk about Final Sentence, which you guys did something a little bit different. Almost the opposite of this Fish Hunters. Fish hunters, you know, you released it. Some bugs. Mixed review, final sentence, I think to date, which is probably wrong now 'cause of your amazing strategy. But to date, when I last talked to you, it had about 300K wishlist due to a very viral video. But you've delayed the game. So why did you do that?
Kirill: So yeah, maybe it's the first time we it about the Final Sentence in the public, but when we releasing the demo, we released the demo, which went extremely viral. We were thinking let's release it for the three bucks and just, let it go. And the last week, like we decide, let's try to go to the next phase with the demo.
Maybe there will be some result because the concept we originally, we believe in it, we have high hopes for this concept, but the development process was hard and the team also burnout. So, we say, maybe we need just to release it as it is. And last time, in last minute, we decided to go to the next phase, release the demo, and it went extremely viral.
So, it was the right choice. Yeah. But the development process was also hard because of the team. No, not because the relationship between team and the publisher team itself is burnout. They were crunching, they were trying to do their best and they just say, well tired. And, of course, when they see the response from the market, because to be honest, we first time we shared the actual gameplay because on the announce we did the cinematic trailer, it was very great, but it get almost nothing for us.
It's like seven or take 10K of wishlist. And when we first shared the gameplay video, it went viral and get what it get right now. Yeah. And the first video was from the close play test, to be honest. Again, when we send the keys or we open, it's in a Steam, and he suddenly we're in this cohort. So, there was a streamer who just doing the stream in the, let's say, black and white camera in, in a very strange angle.
And he was just typing in a Final Sentence and his videos like get 1 million view in one day.
Alexandra: Yeah.
Kirill: Okay. This is very viral and of course we're starting to do this, white demo and start sharing. So, guys, please take this video. It went very viral on TikTok, so you need to post it and of course it, it works.
So, when you see this, the algorithm works well with it. You can start, let's see. Put more speed in it.
Alexandra: Mm, mm-hmm. Yeah, I think I remember seeing it. It's a little bit like Death Noie, like Yami kind of vibe. Yeah. Yeah. Which is, you know, but it also plays into kind of a cultural anime trope that holds a large established audience.
People kind of get it, they're like, oh, imagine if, like, like Yami, but like, et cetera, et cetera. But I mean, I think the, the point here that I think is interesting is like that you're like, okay, we may not be able to live up to this hype based on the current game right now, so we're gonna pull back and we're gonna give it a little bit more time so that it will perform.
Sure. I think that's like a interesting strategy because basically what you're doing with each of the products in your portfolios, you're choosing to do something different per product. Like, which is, I think, really important. Like, you're like, Hey, like Fish Hunters was like this and so we're gonna release it bugs included, this game not ready. But we're not, and because of the virality, we're not gonna release it, which I think are like almost two opposing strategies.
Kirill: Yeah. There was also some, let's say maybe the origin of the delay is when we raised the demo, it's almost the full game. So, we don't have anything to release for money. They already paid free. And if we do the same for the money.
Alexandra: Everyone loves the game 'cause it was already fully free in the whole thing.
Kirill: Yet we were like, oh gosh, there is no additional content. So, the demo is, was the full game. Right? And we say, okay, so, and if it's viral, of course, yeah, we can get another round of funding.
We do some additional funding for the team, and we decided now we need to expand, we need to put more content, we do all this stuff for the, ranking, matchmaking, et cetera. Because we see how, how they play for it. Yeah. So, yeah, because, again, because of the demo, we can't release the same version for the premium model and we need to do something.
If the demo failed without the wishlist, probably we'll just put it to release for the three packs and see how it goes. Yeah.
Alexandra: Okay. All right.
Kirill: Okay. The, the product, yeah. The, the approach is different per product because we're still small team and we in the talk each other, each product almost every day. So, it's not a corporation in the publisher.
We know everyone, everyone knows us. So yeah, there is nothing strictly to the pipeline, so we can do whatever we want.
Alexandra: Right. Okay. Very nice. All right, so now we're about to wrap up on the top of our episode, and I wanna ask some sort of like, conclusion and closing questions that are, we're kind of at the more, at the macro. You're obviously. This, this strategy allows you to kind of pipe rapid learnings from shipping so many games into informing the next step that you do. And so, I'm sure with every single one of these games, you're getting repeated hits at bat and you're taking those learnings, and you're using it for the next games.
I have a few questions that are more about like the space in general, and you know, the, the, the kind of like the zeitgeist questions around games and discovery and AI. You know, you mentioned in one of your games you made AI generated content, and did the players of this game care? And is that informing how you build? And if that's true, should it?
Kirill: Oh, it's a tricky question because, yeah. Developer decide that he needs really funny country style music about the fishing and hunting, and we say, why not? But the, and we also put the disclosure message on Steam that the audio in this game is a generated to avoid negative reviews.
And of course, most of the negative reviews, except the bugs, was about the AI music. And it's very hard to tell the players that it's sometimes it's hard for the indie developers to hire an orchestra. Before the session about the fishing and hunting in the woods. So we just, give up and say, no problem at all.
So maybe we will, if somebody decides to put AI music, we will try not ask them not to do it. But if it's needs for the vibe, okay, no problem. We will get some negative reviews, but no,
Alexandra: You'll handle it. Yeah.
Kirill: Yeah. It's in disclosure. Right. And the disclosure that we can hire the orchestra, or I dunno, five metal bands to, to do this, write the perfect track for us.
Alexandra: Yeah. I, I think that that's actually, I don't know, this is my personal perspective, but I think that eventually people are going to kind of get over it. It's good. It takes some time, but I think it will eventually be something that is, becomes kind of like a laid foundation for how to build certain kinds of games.
And I think that that's, I think games always really struggles with that, with that, with that fact, which is, gamers have extremely high expectations, have no perspective of how hard it is to build these things or how much it costs, and then expect the world and also they want it for free. Which is the hardest kind of customer to deal with.
But, I think it's an interesting story there because you're like, Hey, like we're gonna release it and if there's mixed reviews, that's fine and we're comfortable with that. Yeah.
Kirill: Like, and we have the opposite case for the list area. As I say, it's, let's say the Majesty like Game and The Majesty, the legendary game with the legendary Narrat.
And we hire exactly the same guy, the George Ledou, who is narrator of the original Majesty to do the voiceover for the our Game Azaria. And his voice was in the trailer and with his, let's say, legendary phrase, like, Welcome, Your Majesty. And everyone go to the comment section and say, you steal the voice. It's an AI. I say—
Alexandra: Oh, that's, so you're like, Hey, this time it's actually not AI.
Kirill: It's actually the guy, we'll also put him in the menu that it's the original voice. We say that it's him. We paid him for it. It's not that much. We paid, he do the voiceover for the, most of the characters. Say you steal his voice, you steal the voice.
Guys from the feature you say you steal every voice. We say why. Okay. So yeah, there is some, let's say, witch hunting process in the comment section. So, I don't know, I think we need just to leave another year or two. We see where it's was.
Alexandra: See where it lands. Yeah. Okay. You mentioned that a big part of Polden is, you know, a big, there's obviously a big cost advantage. You have highly technical developers, with a 1% tax in Georgia being like a modicum. Right. Do you think that this advantage in the long run evaporates as the geo matures and in which case, like the cost of development for your games would then obviously go up?
Kirill: I think no, because there are a lot of countries with a low taxes regime, and it depends on the, let's say, community and the Indian developers where to go. So right now, we have some guys in Poland and Poland is, it's Europe, but it's not that high in tax. And I think we have the, all this Georgia, Armenia on this East Asia, even Dubai also, there's zero taxes at all. So, I think there is always some countries where you can do the stuff cheaper.
Alexandra: Okay.
Kirill: So, I'm not sure. And we're also trying to expand, so maybe we'll try to work with India guys, maybe with the Brazilian teams. So yeah, there are too many people, too many developers, and we need just to find the proper way to communicate with them. But it's really great when you can do game five times cheaper or two times cheaper. It's better to do this than—
Alexandra: Yeah. Absolutely. And then, a second question that's somewhat related to that is there's this like phrase that like some publishers, they won't get out of bed for games under a million, right. For indies. And why do you think indie publishers usually won't touch games under a million dollars in development budget? The more traditional ones, I mean.
Kirill: I dunno, maybe it's just not the money for them. So yeah, they, they, they can hold, I dunno, 10 of millions for two, three years and just wait for the ROI. So, for us, it doesn't work. We don't have this amount of money we need to iterate. So, our goal right now is to do 100 tries maybe in the next year and maybe in a year or two we'll do 1000 tries.
So, we'll try to test as much prototypes as we can, find the viral one, which get response on the market and do and provide them the full support to go from idea or from this prototype, let's say it's visual prototype. When we have the build, when we have the game, when you have the visual style. But the trailer may be a bit, not fake, but it's a bit mm, I dunno, staged trailer.
So, it's maybe, it's a mobile publishing approach. But for us it's crucial to find a heat and we want to find.
Alexandra: Right.
Kirill: And yet this thousand or hundred of tries I think will be done in next years.
Alexandra: Okay. What does, what you are seeing from your vantage point tell you about the tastes of the modern gamer today and how has that evolved or is it not evolved in the past decade?
I mean, you mentioned that many of the gamers are their traditional tier one countries, right? Yeah. They're not like you found this secret pocket of Latam gamers that are all playing Totally Secure Airports. So, I'd be curious like what your take is on the tastes of the gamer in 2026.
Kirill: Oh, to be honest, I don't know the state like 10 years ago because I didn't get any research about it.
So, when we were an agency a year ago, we did a lot of customer research for money for the game studio, and we researched the simulator players and the cozy players and we saw that there is almost everyone in these games. So, we saw the guy who played Dark Souls and Battlefield, and after he switched to this cozy cooking game, so I think they play almost everything.
Of course, you have this, maybe free to play gamers who play only on console or only on the free to play games, but for Steam, for Engine, I think, yeah, it depends on the genre, but in general, I, I'm not sure I can find any outstanding point. So, for the U.S. it'll be the, I can't even say if it's male or female.
The best genre in the cozy genre. There are more females in shooters, narrative for more, more males. So, nothing else standing. I think so it's the regular gaming portrait which we see on this Steam.
Alexandra: Yeah, but I think like the thing that's interesting here is that, you know, there's AAA player, like of someone who plays Battlefield Six or a hardcore competitive PVP player who plays Apex or Overwatch or CS Go.
And those people now also wanna play Catch A Fish or whatever, Fish Hunters. And I think that that's definitely, I think, a different thesis than perhaps what it has been like. You know, for myself, like having started my career at Blizzard and, you know, seeing the different tastes of gamers evolve into like, hey, like this kind of player will play this high end AA game, but also play this like kind of short chaptered fun co-op slot game with a friend for two weekends in a row and do that as well. And I think there's a malleability that I think I'm observing for a lot of players where people are really gonna be open to a lot more genres than they may potentially used to be. So maybe that's at least something cool.
Kirill: I think when it comes to the price under 10 bucks, everyone is open for the new experience. So, the peak repo open the, the channel for the—
Alexandra: That's a great point.
Kirill: More gamers. Yeah.
Alexandra: Yeah.
Kirill: So, if your games are cheap and you can spend two evenings with the friends, I think 10 bucks is more than enough. So, this friend genre, I think will be evolving in the next year.
Very, very good in very good points there.
Alexandra: Yeah. Okay. And last question is, where do you think games discovery really occurs right now? You know, I think I had a philosophy and through reading a lot of blogs about marketing games, et cetera, that people don't always go to Steam to discover games. They, by the time they hit the store, and you've already mentioned like only 35% of your, of the, of the wishlist from that one game came from the discovery feed, which is still a third.
It's a lot, but it's not the two thirds. It's not the majority. Yeah. People don't go to Steam to discover games. So where do they discover them in your opinion?
Kirill: Maybe it depends on our, let's say marketing strategy, but we can see that everything is from the short form content. In our survey, when we say, where did you hear about our game, it was like half of the TikTok, Instagram and YouTube shorts, and another half is from friends.
From friends means that somebody shared the video with them in the TikTok and we see this like, and the share ratio, sometimes it's like three times bigger, so they don't push like button, they just push the share button and that's it. So, for us, that short form is a kink, and we think in the next year it will, there may be a revolution here, but let's see how the platform will handle it.
Alexandra: Excellent.
Kirill: But right now, yeah, it's, it's, it's a cheat code. If you get that attention in the short form content, I think it's great. You need just to provide this amount of game to the algorithms. Yeah. If it's one game per five year, there is no chances if you miss the one game and you have only five year to the next one.
Yeah. Maybe it's not the big, good strategy. You need to find this festival, read it genres, all this other marketing. If you have like 20 games per year, like we, of course, short form. Yeah.
Alexandra: It's the king. Alright. Look, Kirill, it was such a pleasure. This is the top of our episode. There's clearly so much cool stuff going on at Polden.
I loved exploring the space of micro indies with you. And it's amazing that you came to our show today to share your journey and, and what you guys are working on. How can someone get in touch with you if they, if they wanted to?
Kirill: I think Link, LinkedIn is the best 'cause, yeah, I always responding to the messages, so LinkedIn or email. We can leave it somewhere, so no problem. Yeah.
Alexandra: Perfect. Alright. As always, friends, if you've got feedback or ideas, hit me up at [email protected]. I am always open. And with that, we're out. See you next time.
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