Narrative RPG 1000xResist became a critical darling when it released in May 2024 — but like so many other great indie games, it didn’t get its flowers at The Game Awards in December. But a buzz has been amassing around the game since the nominees for TGAs were announced, according to sunset visitor 斜陽過客 founder and creative director Remy Siu. Now, Siu is reporting the game’s highest sales day of all time was Jan. 2, 2025, almost exactly seven months after it was released.
Mostly, Siu says, the buzz has been due to anger at the voting apparatus for excluding the title from nominations.
“I was on a plane flying back home – having been on vacation for the first time in four years – and I bought internet on the plane to watch the Game Award Nominations announcements. Unfortunately, we were not nominated for anything. I was a little sad about it, but figured yeah – makes sense, we’re a small experimental game,” Siu told me in a Bluesky message. “But almost immediately after the announcements, people started posting about how they were upset we were not included.”
Siu said the game’s “off-sale resting rate,” aka its sales rate under normal conditions, rose a bit after those nominations, which were announced in August. A slew of fall sales through September, October, and November meant more wishlists and more purchases, and Siu said The Game Awards on Dec. 12 kicked off another reactionary conversation about the game. The final domino to fall? The game’s win for Narrative Game at the first-ever Indie Game Awards.
“Sale numbers were not poor before Jan. 1,” Siu said, clarifying that the devs expected fewer sales overall by that point. “It has to be remembered that 1000xRESIST is a weird, experimental narrative game with no traditional gameplay that talks about things that most games don’t talk about – and also, we wanted to keep many things a secret.”
Siu said the game’s release and reception trajectory has taught him about the value of post-launch marketing, but that mishap may have been worth the risk to keep the game’s secrets, well, secret. “I think we always knew that, if we were able to make an engrossing enough experience, it would come down to word of mouth. That people would have to discover it over time,” he said. And that’s exactly what’s happened.
It’s a rare but heartening success story that underscores the power of the indie community and decentralized forms of marketing, like word of mouth — despite Siu’s assertion that “the indie game distribution apparatus is not always well tuned to make these kinds of experiences possible, from what I can tell.”
Siu credits several factors to the game’s recent uptick in sales — the apropos timing of the industry’s shift towards Bluesky, Steam deals and giveaway collabs with other indie devs, getting mentions on Best of the Year lists like ours, and collaborations with other games like Balatro. But, Siu theorized, not being in The Game Awards, and the reaction that garnered from fans who truly understood the game, was an unexpected boon.
“I hope word of mouth continues to allow more people to discover the game,” Siu said. “I think there’s enough evidence now that it’s really working, it’s allowing us to make more games in the future.”
