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The original was posted on /r/godot by /u/ActZeroGames on 2025-05-04 17:09:07+00:00.
Two Years Later: What We Got Right, What We Got Wrong, and What We Learned
When we started working on We. The Refugees: Ticket to Europe, we didn’t have a publisher, a studio, or even a real budget. Just an idea, a lot of questions, and more ambition than we probably should’ve had. Two years after release, the game was nominated to and received international awards, has earned a dedicated niche following, and a respectable 83% positive rating on Steam — but financially, it hasn’t been the success we hoped for.
This post mortem is a look behind the curtain: how the game was born, how we pulled it off with limited resources, what mistakes we made (some of them big), and what we’d do differently next time. It’s part reflection, part open notebook — for fellow devs, curious players, and anyone wondering what it really takes to make a politically charged narrative game in 2020s Europe.
Let’s start at the beginning.
The Origins of the Game
The idea behind We. The Refugees goes back to 2014–2015, when news about the emerging refugee crisis began making global headlines. At the time, the two co-founders of Act Zero — Jędrzej Napiecek and Maciej Stańczyk — were QA testers working on The Witcher 3 at Testronic. During coffee breaks, they’d talk about their desire to create something of their own: a narrative-driven game with a message. They were particularly inspired by This War of Mine from 11 bit studios — one of the first widely recognized examples of a so-called “meaningful game.” All of these ingredients became the base for the cocktail that would eventually become our first game.
At first, the project was just a modest side hustle — an attempt to create a game about refugees that could help players better understand a complex issue. Over the next few years, we researched the topic, built a small team, and searched for funding. Eventually, we secured a micro-budget from a little-known publisher (who soon disappeared from the industry). That collaboration didn’t last long, but it gave us enough momentum to build a very bad prototype and organize a research trip to refugee camps on the Greek island of Lesbos.
That trip changed everything. It made us realize how little we truly understood — even after years of preparation. The contrast between our secondhand knowledge and the reality on the ground was jarring. That confrontation became a defining theme of the game. We restructured the narrative around it: not as a refugee survival simulator, but as a story about someone trying — and often failing — to understand. In the new version, the player steps into the shoes of an amateur journalist at the start of his career. You can learn more about it in the documentary film showcasing our development and creative process.
But for a moment we have no money to continue the development of We. The Refugees. For the next year and a half, the studio kept itself afloat with contract work — mainly developing simulator games for companies in the PlayWay group — while we continued our hunt for funding. Finally, in 2019, we received an EU grant to build the game, along with a companion comic book and board game on the same subject. From the first conversation over coffee to actual financing, the road took about five years.
Budget and Production
The EU grant we received totaled 425,000 PLN — roughly $100,000. But that sum had to stretch across three different projects: a video game, a board game, and a comic book. While some costs overlapped — particularly in visual development — we estimate that the actual budget allocated to the We. The Refugees video game was somewhere in the range of $70,000–$80,000.
The production timeline stretched from May 2020 to May 2023 — three full years. That’s a long time for an indie game of this size, but the reasons were clear:
First, the script was enormous — around 300,000 words, or roughly two-thirds the length of The Witcher 3’s narrative. Writing alone took nearly 20 months.
Second, the budget didn’t allow for a full-time team. We relied on freelance contracts, which meant most contributors worked part-time, often on evenings and weekends. That slowed us down — but it also gave us access to talented professionals from major studios, who wouldn’t have been available under a traditional staffing model.
We built the game in the Godot engine, mainly because it’s open-source and produces lightweight builds — which we hoped would make future mobile ports easier (a plan that ultimately didn’t materialize). As our CTO and designer Maciej Stańczyk put it:
Technically speaking, Godot’s a solid tool — but porting is a pain. For this project, I’d still choose it. But if you’re thinking beyond PC, you need to plan carefully.
Over the course of production, around 15 people contributed in some capacity. Most worked on narrowly defined tasks — like creating a few specific animations. About 10 were involved intermittently, while the core team consisted of about five people who carried the project forward. Of those, only one — our CEO and lead writer Jędrzej Napiecek — worked on the game full-time. The rest balanced it with other jobs.
We ran the project entirely remotely. In hindsight, it was the only viable option. Renting a physical studio would’ve burned through our budget in a matter of months. And for a game like this — long on writing, short on gameplay mechanics — full-time roles weren’t always necessary. A full-time programmer, for instance, would’ve spent much of the project waiting for things to script. Given the constraints, we think the budget was spent as efficiently as possible.
Marketing and Wishlists
For the first leg of the marketing campaign, we handled everything ourselves — posting regularly on Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter. Between July and October 2022, those grassroots efforts brought in around 1,000 wishlists. Modest, but promising. During that period, we took part in Steam Next Fest — a decision we later came to regret. Sure, our wishlist count doubled, but we were starting from such a low base that the absolute numbers were underwhelming. In hindsight, we would’ve seen a much bigger impact if we had joined the event closer to launch, when our wishlist count was higher and the game had more visibility.
Then, in November 2022, our publisher came on board. Within just two days, our wishlist count jumped by 2,000. It looked impressive — at first. They told us the spike came from mailing list campaigns. But when we dug into the data, we found something odd: the vast majority of those wishlists came from Russia. Actual sales in that region? Just a few dozen copies… We still don’t know what really happened — whether it was a mailing list fluke, a bot issue, or something else entirely. But the numbers didn’t add up, and that initial spike never translated into meaningful engagement. You can see that spike here - it’s the biggest one:
From there, wishlist growth slowed. Over the next six months — the lead-up to launch — we added about 1,000 more wishlists. To put it bluntly: in four months of DIY marketing, we’d done about as well as the publisher did over half a year. Not exactly a glowing endorsement.
That said, the launch itself went reasonably well. The publisher managed to generate some nice visibility, generating about 50K visits on our Steam Page on the day of the premiere.
You can compare it to our lifetime results - we managed to gather 12.33 million impressions and 1,318,116 visits of our Steam Page during both marketing and sales phases:
It’s worth noting that nearly 50 titles launched on Steam the same day we did. Among them, we managed to climb to the #3 spot in terms of popularity. A small victory, sure — but one that highlights just how fierce the competition is on the platform.
Looking back, the launch may not have delivered blockbuster sales, but it did well enough to keep the game from vanishing into the depths of Steam’s archive. It’s still alive, still visible, and — to our mild surprise — still selling, if slowly.
After the premiere we saw a healthy bump: roughly 2,500 new wishlists in the month following release. By early June 2023, our total had climbed to around 6,300. After that, growth was slower but steady. We crossed the 10,000-wishlist mark in May 2024, a full year after launch. Since then, things have tapered off. Over the past twelve months, we’ve added just 1,500 more wishlists. Here are our actual wishlist stats:
During the promotional period, we also visited many in-person events: EGX London, PAX East Boston, GDC San Francisco, BLON Klaipeda. We managed to obtain the budget for these trips - mostly - from additional grants for the international development o…
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