A developer team from Uppsala, Sweden, was on the brink of collapse. Their last game Voidigo was not a success, and the development had dragged on for six years. The team had barely any money left for a new project, was exhausted, and needed a vacation first. For their new project, the goal was set: There is actually no money for it, so let’s at least mess it up quickly. But R.E.P.O. was created and became a hit on Steam.
This was the situation of the developers: The team Semiworks had worked on Voidigo for 6 years and it didn’t perform nearly as well as the developers had hoped. At its peak, the game had just 622 concurrent players. Moreover, the team was burnt out after the long development time and took a vacation first.
But one developer, Axel Landén, felt the itch to code again after just three weeks. For his new project, he aimed: “Let’s at least mess it up quickly this time,” as the funds had run out and there was essentially nothing available to develop a new game after Voidigo.
The decision was quickly made to develop the new game with the Unity engine, but none of the staff really had any experience with it.
With the team on vacation, the money almost exhausted, and a new engine – the path for Semiworks was essentially leading straight to bankruptcy. But things were about to take a different turn.
Idea develops further during the development
So the game was born: When the people returned from their vacation, they approached an idea they had once had: A game where you were supposed to clean a horror house.
So a “cleaning game” with a horror setting. Basically an absurd combination of genre and theme. For the visuals, they chose the “found footage” style. The game was supposed to look like someone had found a camera recording of the events.
But when they introduced an enemy that fit well into the horror scenario and provided plenty of jump scares, they realized how well the idea for the game worked. The question arose: “How about we turn this into a multiplayer game?”
At that point, the cleaning aspect was thrown out of the game because cleaning buildings is nothing that’s fun in real life. Wouldn’t it be better to give the players something else to do? Maybe let them work for a moving company? But moving isn’t fun either. How about tax collection?
So the game transformed from a “single-player cleaning game” to a “multiplayer tax collection game”.
The game organically grew further with numerous rogues and monsters, allowing the Swedes to let their imagination run wild.
R.E.P.O. hits the pulse of the times on Steam as a co-op title for little money
How did it go then? What sounded like a wild hodgepodge and the next flop turned into a massive hit for the Swedes.
R.E.P.O. was released in late February 2025 in early access on Steam for €9.75 and peaked at 266,908 players. Even now, almost 2 months after release, there are still 110,000 people playing the game concurrently at the height of each day.
As an affordable co-op title, R.E.P.O. has hit the pulse of the times, similar to how Among Us managed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Up to 6 people can play R.E.P.O. simultaneously and scream at each other hilariously:
Old “Among Us” streamers like Valkyrae made the game popular on Twitch. Valkyrae and the VTuber Ironmouse are the leading Twitch streamers for R.E.P.O. worldwide.
In Germany, Papaplatte, Gronkh, and Dhalucard are the leading Twitch streamers.
With 96% positive reviews, R.E.P.O. is considered a favorite among the audience on Steam. Not bad for a game whose declared goal was to waste as little time as possible on development. For some, R.E.P.O. is already the unofficial successor to Balatro, the indie hit of 2024: The best game of the year comes from a single developer and impresses millions on Steam
