A developer doesn’t just create a surprise hit on Steam, but also mixes in with players to gather authentic feedback up close. However, he remains incognito and takes on the role of an ordinary player.
Which game is it about? We’re talking about R.E.P.O., a horror multiplayer on Steam, which in February 2025 caused a surprise hit, even though the studio behind it actually just wanted to mess up their game quickly. Instead, the title reached 271,571 concurrent players at its peak on March 23, 2025 (via SteamDB, as of May 10, 2025, 2:20 PM).
For just around €10, you can dive into the Early Access of the co-op game and gather valuable items from creepy environments as little robots with up to 5 friends for your creators. However, you should be careful, as creepy creatures are on your heels.
In their dev vlogs, the developers have increasingly been addressing the lore behind their game, as well as classical changes and development progress since the start. This is also the case in the latest video on YouTube, in which developer Pontus Sundstrom reports that he blended in incognito with the community.
You can get an impression of the game in the trailer:
“I even played with many of you, incognito and secretly”
Why did the developer do this? In the video from minute 0:48, Sundstrom reports that during the beta for the new features, he secretly mixed in with players through the random matchmaking. He wanted to ask the community unbiased questions to receive authentic feedback on the innovations.
However, fun was not neglected either, and he adds a clip to the video where he asks his teammates, “how pro they are.” A teammate responds that she is quite a pro and that they have already put over 100,000 hours into the game. That this would not add up with a release on February 26, 2025, is obvious – as they would have had to play for about 4,167 days.
Aside from such rather funny moments, he was also able to receive valuable feedback that will now be incorporated into future updates before the new version goes live.
This shows that the team behind R.E.P.O. is very community-oriented and proves that the unfiltered opinion of their players is very important to them. In the past, the developers also addressed a potential switch to free-to-play after Early Access and explained why they will probably never do that: A hit game on Steam will never be free because the developer wants to protect us from an evil of the gaming industry
