Hey everybody! It's Fine is a classic idler game about releasing v1.0 of your game on time with your dog Joe, made by me and my gifted wife Cat 🐈

We recently released our demo on Steam, check it out here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4608740/Its_Fine_Demo/

The demo features:

• 45-60 minutes of net progression content
• Early prestige loops and unique mechanics
• 7 Challenges with game altering rewards that requires you to get creative or play around with different builds
• 20 achievements, 3 secret achievements

We really tried to create a unique take on the idlers we appreciate and love.

Thanks everyone, hope you check it out, and you're more than welcome to come hang at our Discord and join the discussion on the game, or just have a friendly chat :D

Love,

Cat & Dog - Buma Games

Hey real masterracers. If you're into idle games, me and my wife just dropped the demo for our game It's Fine.

It's a classic idle game about developing a game with your dog Joe, featuring multi prestige layers, alt endings, secrets, unique mechanics and challenges, and 0 AI used!
It also has tons of tech/dev humor so you nerds should feel right at home :D

Check it out here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4608740/Its_Fine_Demo/

glhf 🐧

Hey gamedevs, so like the title suggests here's some data and thoughts about our recently released demo, hope this helps, and feel free to ask anything in the comments! Textwall incoming:

TL;DR - We launched with 5k, peaked at 77 CCU, And earned an additional 1600 Wishlist in two weeks.

About us and the game:

We're a husband (I'm Dog, hi!) and wife (Cat) duo, and this is our first game. We both worked at the same place for years (I'm a software engineer, and she's a designer), and we decided to yolo quit and make a game.

The game is called It's Fine and it is a classic idler. We spent about 5 months until we had a finalized demo version, and we did marketing along the way.

The road to a demo with 5k Wishlists:

Wishlist graph: https://imgur.com/gallery/steam-demo-launch-wishlists-game-its-fine-L2E3vP3

Steam Page Launch (Dec)

- We launched our page on Dec 2nd 2025, which is also where we made our first huge mistake - originally we called the game Crypto Grinder, which was suppose to be an idle satire on crypto, but that blew up right in our faces because:

• Social medias got instantly shadow-banned because "crypto"
• Reddit posts instantly got nuked
• We realized no content creators will cover it and risk using "Crypto" in their video titles
• We got a really bad starting amount of Wishlists. probably again due to the crypto theme and the lack of a strong hook

So we panicked, started arguing and fighting, and with about 50 Wishlists in the first 2 weeks - we were in a really bad place, and about to give up on the game and start looking for new jobs.

Rebranding and initial momentum (Dec - Jan)

We rebranded from Crypto Grinder to It's Fine - an idle game where you need to deliver a game on time with your dog Joe. After a week of extreme grind mode, we rebranded the entire steam page / assets / trailer etc, posted to r/incremental_games (main sub of the genre), and went to bed.

That post ended up generating about a 100 Wishlists, and it didn't even go viral or anything like that! that gave us the initial confirmation that we have something legit in our hands, and was a breath of fresh air!

Reddit ads and early playtest (Jan - Feb)

Breakdown & Stats: https://imgur.com/a/J8Ewfz2

Spend: 1,200$, 65%~ US/CA, and 35% on UK/Germany/Australia.

Wishlists Gained: about 1,500~

Playtest Signups: about 1,000~

The ads were simple galleries of the splash image (Steam capsule) and than some in-game shots. We opened the comments section, and added some details in a pinned comment. So when we ran these ads we actually had 3 goals in mind:

• Validation - see how our results compare with the many case-studies available here on Reddit to validate the appeal of our game + the capsule image
• Get playtest signups through Steam's built-in feature
• See if we can trigger organic exposure from Steam

So long story short, the CTR and cost per Wishlist were great, comments on the ad were surprisingly positive (and no ASCII sausages), however we didn't got any organic traffic from Steam after the campaigns ended.

We also made another big mistake here: we kept the playtest signups open for way too long! we were so hyped about the numbers pouring in that we didn't even thought about the fact that we did not need that many playtesters, and having that big green button on the top of our Steam page probably cost us a bunch of Wishlists for that period.

Playtest and creators outreach (Feb - April)

After a couple of small (100~ players) playtest rounds, we posted again to r/incremental_games to get testers to the final (would-be-demo) version.

This time the post did blow up, hitting #1 on the subreddit for 2 days, netting about 300~ Wishlists, But more important - generating brilliant feedbacks from the community!

After we felt we have a good enough demo version, we started reaching out to content creators about 2-3 weeks before the release, and had ok results: none of the really gigantic creators (1m+ subs) made content so far, but a big creator of our genre (Idle Cub) did post a great video, netting almost 1,500 Wishlists in 2 days.

Demo Launch (April 16th):

Stats after exactly 2 weeks from launch:

• Peak CCU**:** 77
• Playtime: Median 50m, Avg. 2h 5m
• Reviews: 31, all positive
• Unique Demo Players: 2655

Launch Day and New & Trending Demos:

So overall we had a pretty solid launch. GT uploaded our trailer a couple hours before launch, and we managed to get 10 reviews for the demo page in a couple of hours, a lot of which came from the great community we managed to build over time.

That was good enough for us to land on the demo's page new and trending for 4 days, generating about 80k impressions and a couple 100's more Wishlists.

How we could've hit more than 77 CCU:

There are a couple factors - first of which is luck - all but one of the creators uploaded content of the game days before the demo was released. If they would've uploaded in the first 24-48 hours of launch we probably would've hit a higher count, but like I said - that's luck.

"But why no embargo??" - I have a feeling embargos for small games is a big silly and just adds potential friction. I think its more relevant to big games with big publishers, but I might be wrong

Also, since we did extensive testing and handed out playtest keys to pretty much all our community, a lot of our most eager followers already played pretty much the entire demo content on the playtest version, and didn't play the actual demo. I think that's a net positive though, because it really helped us ship a good demo, as reflected in the playtime numbers and reviews so far.

The last thing I think of is another major rookie mistake we've made:

I noticed the community was really engaging with our posts and stuff early on, and the engagement kinda dropped hard on the server although many of the players also talked with me privately and for the vast majority had really positive attitude towards us and the game. I'm pretty sure that happened because I forgot to mute notifications from the welcome channel, so every time a new member joined, everybody got notified, which made them mute our server. I can't prove this, but I'm pretty sure that's the case, and if we hadn't done that we could've reach a bit more of our hardcore community on launch day.

Aftermath:

Daily players and Wishlists gradually decayed as expected, and are now sitting at about 7 peak daily CCU and 20-30 Wishlists, all organic and probably the vast majority of those are from Steam.

So is that a success? short answer - we don't know

Well, success is subjective. When we started this project we defined 1 main goal in to define success with our game - can this finance our next one?

In today's Steam meta, a demo launch is a massive event that usually gives you a rough idea of your commercial potential. Honestly, we were hoping for a bit more definitive verdict - either "It's a massive banger and the internet is going wild" or "It's shit and an absolute flop."

Instead, we landed somewhere in the middle. Our metrics are solid enough that hitting our KPI is a real possibility, but they definitely aren't high enough for us to just kick back and chill. I guess that's life!

To sum it up - we're happy with the reactions (playtimes, reviews), not that happy with the peak CCU, and still have no idea how we'll perform moving forward, but we're optimistic.

If you have any questions or want more info on anything go ahead! you can also contact us on Discord - Cat_BumaGamesGG / Dog_BumaGamesGG 🤘

Goodluck everyone! see you in our Steam Next Fest Postmortem

- Cat & Dog

Game Title: It's Fine

State: Public Demo Available

Playable Link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4608740/Its_Fine_Demo/

Platform: Win, Linux, Playable on Steam Deck, and coming soon to Web and Mac.

Description: A classic idle game about surviving indie dev crunch where you have a 24 hours deadline to develop a game with your dog / boss Joe.

Features:

• Unique mechanics, challenges, synergies, and secrets
• Inspired by the likes of Tower Wizard and Gnorp Apologue
• Boomer / 90s kids humor. A lot of it. Die Hard quantities of it.
• Made by humans for humans - 0% AI was used.

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPaqRFSJi54

Gameplay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOlFJZ6H99g&t=264s

Free to Play Status:

• [X] Free to play
• [X] Demo/Key available
• [ ] Paid (Allowed only on Tuesdays with [TT] in the title)

Involvement: Me and my wife are the solo devs of this game. Music was written and recorded by Alon Amit

glhf!