It’s tremendous to see something that’s just unambiguously good. After the recent discussions of just how hard it is to see a game succeed on Steam, what a pleasure to see the unabashed emotional joy of game developer Cakez on seeing his game make $250,000. It’s even better for his partner bursting in and celebrating with him.
Tangy TD is a tower defense indie game with frantic action and explosively busy battles, and it could so easily have been one of the many tower defense games that’ll come out this year and slip completely under the radar. In this case, however, a delightful clip of the developer and his wife reacting to the $32,000 in gross revenue the game earned from its first 30 hours on sale went viral a week ago, driving even more attention to the game and leading to an even more emotionally charged video.
Game dev Cakez77 reacts to how much money his game made 30 hours after release following four years of development pic.twitter.com/GZCJ665K7v
— Dexerto (@Dexerto) March 11, 2026
The glimpse of Cakez’s Steam back-end in the first clip, taken from a livestream and originally reported by Dexerto, shows that Tangy TD had sold 3,676 copies, grossing $31,942 in the process and causing the developer and his partner to become jubilant. But that turns out to be nothing compared to their reaction to that income increasing almost eight-fold. You can see the wonderful moment he opens the Steam report and sees the gross revenue of $245,000 here:
This is also an extremely useful case study when it comes to how we (the press, and games players) judge the success of a game by jumping on SteamDB and declaring something a failure for its low-looking figures. Tangy TD‘s all-time high number of simultaneous players is 795, and last night it peaked at 462. And yes, those would be awful numbers were this a new $200 million live-service game from a big-name publisher, but here they represent a quarter of a million bucks for a solo developer.
It’s also a rare glimpse into how accurate those sales estimates that appear on SteamDB really are. And the answer is: quite close, actually. At the time of hitting $245k, the game had sold 28,171 copies (with 2,892 refunded), falling pretty much in the middle of the three estimated figures shown on the site.
It’s also worth bearing in mind that this is before Valve takes its 30 percent cut, so that net of $197,847 becomes $138,492, and that game took four years to make, working out to $34,600 a year. Just in case you were planning on ditching your job. At the same time, name another industry where you can create something by yourself, put it out there on your own terms, and bring in serious money. Let’s hope the game’s sales have a long tail, and Cakez can keep having similar moments of joy.
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