An Indian developer has finally released her game after many years and made it into the trends on Steam – but then Electronic Arts (EA) came along.
What 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 reportedly an adventure-crafting game.
You take on the role of the young witch Luna, who solves puzzles with her homemade potions and gathers further ingredients from various monsters. The fantasy game is rated for ages 6 and can certainly be understood as a so-called cozy game.
As Gittins revealed in an interview with comfycozygames.com, she actually started the development of Potions: A Curious Tale as a portfolio project about 10 years ago. However, when the game gained interest and support in her circle, she launched a Kickstarter campaign 8 years ago, in 2016.
Here you can see a trailer for Potions: A Curious Tale:
EA knocks indie game out of trends with shadow drop
On Steam, there is a list of popular new releases. It lists games that have just been released and are already well-received by players. The higher a game appears on the list, the more popular it is.
On X.com, Gittins reported in a post that Potions: A Curious Tale was pushed out of the list of popular new releases shortly after the game’s release by EA.
How did EA throw the indie game out of the trends? EA released eight games from the “Command and Conquer” series on Steam on March 7. These are popular strategy games with base building and large battles.
In addition, 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.
In total, these are 11 well-known and quite popular titles that originally released years ago and now all positioned themselves above the indie game in the popular new releases.
EA did not announce the release of the 11 games significantly in advance – thus, the developer had no chance to move her release forward or backward to avoid EA’s Steam offensive.
Gittins consequently had very bad luck with her release, and her indie game got overshadowed by 11 well-known competitors.
This is a fate that another indie game this year cannot suffer: Hades 2 – the success of its predecessor was too great. The sequel is set to come out in 2024: Award-winning action game has 98% positive reviews on Steam, sequel starts in early access in 2024
