Trying to sift through the sands of AI slop that’s proliferating Steam nowadays is a thankless task. With progressively more games being released year-on-year, finding the good stuff is only getting harder. Discoverability has long been the headache for any indie game marketer, and cracking the nut has never been more challenging. Launching a game just days apart from another publisher offering the same title is perhaps the worst case scenario. When even your game’s name is no longer a differentiator, it’s a bit chalked. Well, this exact thing happened to Neon Polygons and Gamkat, who, after a pleasant back and forth, lent into it with a sparklingly positive outcome.
Neon Polygons’ Piece by Piece is a puzzle game that requires you to arrange and rearrange puzzle pieces so that your character can progress to the goal. With 100 handcrafted levels to tease your brain with, it’s an ingenious spin on a well-trodden concept. Gamkat’s Piece by Piece, meanwhile, is an adorably relaxing indie that sees its vulpine protagonist inherit their family’s repair shop, with the simple-yet-noble goal of fixing up the forest folks’ prized possessions.
Though Dev Land Marketing, which handles Neon Polygons, announced its March 13 release date first, No More Robots, the publisher behind Gamkat’s game, then set a course for March 11. Disaster! As Dev Land head Gajda Andreea recalls on X, “our team couldn’t believe our chances, I mean seriously what’re the odds?” However, as any good marketer should endeavor, Andreea found the silver lining and turned it to both studios’ advantage.
“I reached out to ‘X person’ at No More Robots with a pitch to collaborate and lean in on the silliness of this,” she continues, “and he had a three word response: ‘That sounds fun.'” The result of this incredibly unlikely collaboration is the Piece by Piece Double Bundle, which you can snag on Steam here for $18.57 / £15.60.
Ultimately, this has, as Andreea says, made for a “very wholesome internet moment.” One Reddit thread discussing the team-up has over 2,000 upvotes at the time of writing, while media outlets that, I can tell you from experience, are inundated with pitches for no-doubt-amazing indies on a daily basis, have tuned in. What should’ve been a death knell for both games ended up becoming their greatest strength, and it should serve as a reminder to any marketer, both within gaming and beyond, that adaptability and being able to roll with the punches can sometimes bring about amazing results.
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