“I DON’T KNOW WHY PIZZA TOWER IS POPULAR”
A brief look at the rise of a hit indie game and what lessons can be learned
“Why is [indie game] popular?” is such a common refrain, especially among developers, that I suspect that what they're really asking is something closer to “Why isn’t MY [indie game] popular?”.
The implication that games succeed out of nowhere is absurdly false, and I’m here to tell you that it’s not that hard to find the breadcrumb trail of clues. This post aims to point you towards what I think are the main reasons for Pizza Tower’s success.
Caveat that I wasn’t part of the Pizza Tower community, I don’t know the developers’ full story, nor have I even played the full game. I’m also being a bit loose with the definition of “popularity”, but for the sake of the pedants out there you can apply what I’m about to write out below to most indie games released on Steam in the past 12 months that have earned at least 1000 reviews and are rated at least “Very Positive” on Steam. That means titles like HYPER DEMON, Trombone Champ, Dorfomantik or Spark the Electric Jester 3. But first…
WHY DID PIZZA TOWER SET OFF ALARM BELLS?
Part of the problem is Pizza Tower appeared to come out of nowhere. Conventional wisdom dictates that any upcoming titles should have a presence on Steam for a few months, perhaps going through an Early Access period or releasing a demo, take part in a festival, maybe appear in some press, and slowly accumulate wishlists on the platform in the build up to an eventual release. Pizza Tower seemed to buck that trend entirely, with its page appearing at the beginning of December 2022. Then, barely eight weeks later, it released immediately into 1.0 on Thursday January 26 2023 with none of the usual fanfare (such as a press release or a coordinated influencer campaign) and earned hundreds of reviews in the first few hours alone and racked up nearly two thousand reviews in just that first week. With such activity it rocketed to the top of Steam’s New & Trending for almost all of its opening weekend, beating out an entirely new IP from the AAA sphere (Hi-Fi Rush), only being toppled by the Dead Space remake a couple of days after its release.
Even then, the game continued to sit in the top ten of Steam’s New & Trending for several days. With such rapid success not often seen, quite a few onlooking game developers were scratching their heads over this gauche sounding title and its crude capsule art. So, what was going on?
REASON #1: THE GAME IS GOOD, ACTUALLY
A rule of thumb for any breakout hit is to check the Steam reviews. Please consider browsing the section yourself. Sly marketing tactics can shift copies, but if a game turns out to be middling garbage, its reviews section will dutifully reflect that. You’ll often find clues to a game’s rapid rise to success as well, such as this review by user Inhale Music (highlighting mine).
Plenty can be said about this review, but here are four initial takeaways:
Pizza Tower’s aesthetic separates it from the noise of other games
The audience for this type of game is very particular but voracious
It is both extremely accessible to play and has a very high skill ceiling
The name is hilarious
Thanks to this review I ended up piecing together a (very rough) back history of Pizza Tower.
REASON #2: THE GAME HAS BEEN IN DEVELOPMENT FAR LONGER THAN YOU THINK
Pizza Tower started development as early as June 2018, which is confirmed by both this tweet from the game’s account and announcement posts by the lead developer McPig in the game’s Discord server.
Pizza Tower took at least five years to make - it did not get thrown together in the space of a few months.
REASON #3: PIZZA TOWER HAD DEMOS
Shortly after the initial reveals on Twitter, around October 2018, Pizza Tower put up a demo on Itch for people to play for free. It later got updated to the SAGE demo that appeared September 2019, which we’ll cover in the next point.
In other words, Pizza Tower had demos (plural) for four and a half years - they just weren’t on Steam.
REASON #4: PIZZA TOWER TOOK PART IN FESTIVALS (JUST NOT THE ONES YOU’RE THINKING OF)
Specifically, Pizza Tower put together a special demo for SAGE or Sonic Amateur Game Expo in 2019. SAGE is an annual event run by Sonic Fan Games HQ, which is a site dedicated to fanworks and projects inspired by old console games like Sonic The Hedgehog and Wario Land. You can watch a VOD of the September 27th 2019 livestream where the organizers are playing the Pizza Tower SAGE demo. Skip to 45:06 and watch for ten minutes.
You’ll see that as far back as 2019, the organizers are unable to hide their glee over the game’s presentation and how it plays, and SFGHQ would later do a follow up interview with the developer after the event. The key point here is that Pizza Tower found its niche early on and catered directly to that audience.
REASON #5: PIZZA TOWER HAD A PATREON
On December 13, 2018, developer McPig opened up a Patreon which closed shortly before the game’s 1.0 release. Patreons would not only get the usual thanks in credits and Discord server roles, but also access to builds, a level editor and eventually a copy of the 1.0 game for pledging only 10 USD once. Years before the game got released, the developers had hundreds of people contributing to the various tiers. Just before the Patreon closed, it was taking in about 2400 USD per month from about 500 patrons. This figure was well past the 600 USD per month that McPig needed to do the game full time.
Another way to look at this is the game was in Early Access for nearly four years, meaning people were playtesting the game that whole time.
REASON #6: A BIG STREAMER PLAYED THE GAME MULTIPLE TIMES
[Vinesauce] Vinny, who currently has over half a million followers on Twitch, played Pizza Tower shortly after the SAGE demo dropped on September 30 2019. Here’s the VOD of that stream.
Much like with the SAGE organizers, it begins with a glowing recommendation for the demo. Within the first minute, Vinny immediately calls out the game’s inspirations, telling his audience exactly what sort of game it is.
Vinny would later go on to do a full playthrough of the 1.0 version which can be seen on their YouTube. The lesson here is that the developers got the attention of a major content creator very early on, which is something that I argued in the conclusion of a previous post. Streamers can be evangelists for a game but building up that relationship between developers and content creators can take a long time.
REASON #7: THE PIZZA TOWER DISCORD
In my opinion this is the biggest reason of all. Unfortunately I don’t have much in the way of statistics, but I did capture on January 27th 2023 (the day after 1.0 launch) that they had this many people on their Discord:
…Though this number only grew, to the point that a lot of channels have since been closed or changed to read-only because the moderation team couldn’t keep up with how many people joined in the couple of months since release.
Fortunately, they kept the announcements channel open, along with the fanworks archive channel, which helped immensely in putting this post together. So in brief:
The server opened in June 2018, many years before the game’s release
Developers frequently posted not only updates, but also treated the server as their own mini-Twitter
Many events took place in the server over the years, from OST listening parties and secret santas to game nights and competitions for people to contribute to the game in some way
Pizza Tower’s fanworks channel opened in 2020 and enshrined hundreds of community works which included things like riffs on the game’s artstyle, remixes of the soundtrack and convention cosplays
When Pizza Tower finally got its Steam page up in December 2022, it informed everyone to go and wishlist the game’s Steam page, the effect of which can be seen by looking at the SteamDB followers chart
Last but by no means least, they pinged @everyone to go and buy the game the moment it became available
The Pizza Tower developers spent years putting together a community that they actively engaged with which they could message en masse when release time came.
IN CONCLUSION
Despite Pizza Tower seeming to come out of nowhere, it had in fact trodden a well worn path walked by other successful indie titles - it just did it in less obvious places. Pizza Tower spent at least five years in development, going through an early access-like period via Patreon for four years. It put out multiple demos and builds for people to try over that time allowing them to slowly improve on a game that ended up appealing to a very specific and demanding audience. The developers took part in events that directly matched the game’s genre to further draw attention. This led to a major streamer covering the game several times. As a result of all their efforts, the developers built up a very active community, hundreds of whom were already experts in playing the game by the time of the 1.0 release, who then swamped the Steam page with purchases and reviews within the first week.
Pizza Tower’s success was a long time coming. Those that would cynically write it off for merely appealing to some base aesthetic are not paying attention and I implore such detractors to instead learn from Pizza Tower, as well as the next game that catches you off guard.