An Indian developer has finally released her game after many years, but then Electronic Arts (EA) came along. Now she says thank you to everyone who played it anyway.
Which game is it? On March 7, 2024, Potions: A Curious Tale was released on Steam. The game was developed by indie developer Renee Gittins and is described as an adventure-crafting game.
- You play as the young witch Luna, who fights monsters with self-brewed potions and solves puzzles on her journey to become a master witch.
- The fantasy game is already rated for ages 6 and can be understood as a so-called cozy game.
Gittins began developing Potions: A Curious Tale over 10 years ago as portfolio work, but when the game piqued interest in her surroundings, she launched a Kickstarter campaign in 2016. It turned into a real game that was finally released for the public in 2024 – but EA intervened.
EA knocks indie game out of the trends with shadow drop
What happened with EA? EA released eight games from the “Command and Conquer” series on Steam on March 7. These are popular strategy games featuring base building and large battles. Additionally, EA released the strategy games “Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri” and “Sim City 3000 Unlimited,” as well as the role-playing game “Dungeon Keeper Gold.”
There are a total of 11 well-known and quite popular titles that had their original release years ago. These games now pushed onto Steam’s list of popular new releases.
There, games are listed that have been newly released and are already well-received by players. The higher a game is on the list, the more popular it is. EA’s 11 new releases all positioned themselves above the indie game and catapulted it out of the popular new releases.
This hit the developer emotionally hard, which she spoke about in a video on Tiktok in tears.
Free update as a “thank you” for the support
This is the latest development: Renee Gittins announced on December 11 that her game, Potions: A Curious Tale, will now be available on PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, and Xbox Series.
In time for the console release, she wanted to, as she writes on Reddit, thank everyone who supported the Steam launch and played it at release with a free endgame update.
A statistic from 2025 also shows why the developer was so emotionally impacted by the EA situation: A large portion of the games released on Steam disappear in the masses: In 2025, over 19,000 games were released on Steam, but almost half of them didn’t even receive 10 reviews
