// PC GAMER — GAMING
Steam Week in Review: This indie publisher released 29 terrible-looking Steam games in a single day—will they make any money?
All the interesting Steam facts for the week ending September 20.
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It's been a busy week for prodigious game publisher Hard Shark Games: on September 15 it released an astonishing 29 games on Steam across a huge variety of genres.
Not only did Hard Shark Games publish that many games, but the company is also marked as developer for every one of them. All of which, mind you, are early access affairs. "We're launching in Early Access to involve the community from the very start," reads the first sentence of every single one of the early access blurbs for Hard Shark Games released in September 2026, which include genres as diverse as racing, retail sim, survival horror, sport, flight sim and 2D platformer.
The same is true for some of the 29 games Hard Shark Games released on March 4 last year: "We're launching in Early Access to involve the community from the very start," reads the first line in the blurb for Speedboat Simulator. “We're launching in Early Access to involve the community from the very start," reads the first line in the blurb for Toy Battlegrounds: Shoot 'Em Up Survival. You get the idea.
The "company" has also taken a similar approach to early access updates: the update notes for Starship Fighters, Sky Combat and Streets of Rageness (!) are identical: "Optimized several core systems, resulting in smoother gameplay and up to 10% better overall performance, especially during longer sessions," reads the first sentence of all three, each of which were published on March 5 within five minutes of each other.
Will Hard Shark Games profit from any of the 29 Steam games it released last week? You may be surprised. It costs $100 to open a Steam store page, which is recoupable if a game makes more than $1,000 adjusted gross revenue. So it would have cost Hard Shark Games $2,900 to publish its 29 very unpromising looking games on Steam, all of which carry an AI disclosure for capsule art but no other aspect of development.
Using the popular Boxleiter Method (via impress.games), which uses a game's public Steam review count to estimate sales, Supermarket Life Simulator—to use just one example—could have made as much as $885 as a high estimate, or $295 on the lower end. Then there's Pool: it could have made as much as $2,780 or as little as $926. Meanwhile, for F1 Simulator we're looking at $1,686 as a high estimate and $562 as a low.
So adding up the low estimates, those three games alone—of 29—have made $1,783 in the five days since release. That's well over half of Hard Shark Games' outlay for the store listings in less than a week on the market, though if the high estimates are more accurate, the $2,900 outlay has been long passed and Hard Shark Games' investment is already paying off handsomely.
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