Dark game becomes a surprise hit despite Steam ban three days before release. A solo dev won a mad dash against time
Survival horror Emissary Zero scored excellent sales on Steam, despite the fact that „the final version was ready a day before release.” Independent developer reveals behind-the-scenes of his success.
The road to a game release can be long and fraught with obstacles, but sometimes the positive feedback from the community makes all the hardships worthwhile. The indie survival horror game Emissary Zero was struggling to meet Steam's requirements until the last minute, but now it's boasting sales of 150,000 copies. The success surprised the creator, who didn't expect such a positive response.
Indie horror phenomenon
Emissary Zero is a first-person game where you, either solo or with up to three friends, have to tackle some nighttime repairs. The issue is that the malfunctions happened in a mysterious complex that's overrun by monsters, and we don't stand a chance against them in a direct fight. So we are left with quiet exploration and vigilant observation of the area while solving puzzles.
The title won over players on Steam, who responded with over 1,700 reviews, 82% of which are positive. The fact that the title has been added to wishlists nearly 200,000 times suggests that sales could really take off.
Emissary Zero fought until the very last moment to launch on Steam
Rone Vine, the creator of the horror, shared his journey to the game's release on Reddit. According to him, work on Emissary Zero started in 2024 with the main goal of completing the project in less than 12 months. In this way, he wanted to avoid a lengthy development process. Especially since he quit his job in September to dive completely into his project.
Rone Vine
Vine's approach forced him to schedule its launch for March 2025, and also led to a crunch in the final 3 months before its release. Despite intense effort, the fate of Emissary Zero was still unclear. Steam rejected the first version of the game due to potential copyright infringement (one of the characters looked too much like Slender Man) and only approved it 2 days before the start of sales. However, this was not the dev's only problem.
I managed to bring all story events together just two weeks before launch. Story texts were finished three days before release, and machine translation for other languages was done two days before. Even though a lot was done at the last moment, the release version was ready a day before launch, recalls the creator of Emissary Zero.
Today, Rone Vine is doing great with both sales and reviews, but it took a bit of luck to get there. The game barely had any marketing, but a viral TikTok video in April this year made it super popular.
Emissary Zero is an interesting title for survival horror fans, and at the same time, an inspiration for independent devs. In July, Vine updated his project to include VR headset support, and now he's already planning a sequel, which he hopes to release on consoles too.
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Author: Krzysztof Kaluzinski
At GRYOnline.pl, works in the Newsroom. He is not afraid to tackle various topics, although he prefers news about independent productions in the style of Disco Elysium. In his childhood, he wrote fantasy stories, played a lot on Pegasus, and then on a computer. He turned his passion into a profession as an editor of a gaming portal run with a friend, as well as a copywriter and advisor in a console store. He doesn't care for remakes and long-running series. Since childhood, he wanted to write a novel, although he is definitely better at creating characters than plot. That's probably why he fell in love with RPGs (paper and virtual). He was raised in the 90s, to which he would gladly return. Loves Tarantino movies, thanks to Mad Max and the first Fallout he lost himself in post-apo, and Berserk convinced him to dark fantasy. Today he tries his hand at e-commerce and marketing, while also supporting the Newsroom on weekends, which allows him to continue cultivating old passions.
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