These are just a few observations I’ve made from collecting and investigating these games.

I am not a star developer or marketing genius, and have shipped 0 commercial games so far. In other words, take these with a grain of salt.

On the development of the games

• Most short-development games are built on top of existing tech or assets.
  • Some take assets from their bigger in-development projects.
  • Some take assets from their previous projects (If you release a bunch of horror games, you’ve got most of the groundwork for graphics and mechanics ready for the next one!)
  • Some take assets made by other people from asset stores or other online resources.
• Marketing/outreach on the more successful games is either a very significant time sink or outsourced to a publisher.
  • Certain games with extremely low development time still spent months afterwards farming wishlists and doing outreach (Gun Frog, Game about Digging a Hole). Seems like a better strategy than releasing it outright, even if the game is done by then.
• Most of the very successful games blow up thanks to content creators. A bunch of those games were deliberately designed as games that could attract/accomodate content creation in some way.

On genres

• Horror dominates Steam in general, and that extends to this list. It’s a very popular category for games with short development cycles, lots of examples to look at here.
• Very surprising amount of multiplayer games, with most being coop and party games.
  • Most recent multiplayer games fall under what is vulgarly refered to as “friendslop” (online multiplayer coop horror/rage games).

On visuals

• Slightly more 3D than 2D games.
  • 2D is mostly home to strategy and roguelike games.
  • 3D is mostly home to first-person horror games.
    • (If you exclude Horror games, 2D wins over 3D)
• A bunch of the better-looking games rely on asset packs and pre-made models rather than bespoke art.