I am doing a podcast with my friends about games (check out The Adventure Mechanics here) and I decided that I need to see how games fail before actually releasing a game. In that pursuit, I'm reviewing Steam games with no reviews to get an idea of why they failed. Here is the transcript for Chubby Cats:
Welcome to The Adventure Mechanics, I'm Chandler. Today, we'll be continuing examining games with zero Steam reviews. And on today's menu, it's Chubby Cats. Chubby Cats is a cat satisfaction puzzle game with time as a constraint. Chubby Cats was released on June 19th, 2025 by Just L Studio. It's their third game they've released on Steam, with another one slated for release sometime in 2026. Just L Studio is a one person show, with their itch.io page showing the same games released on Steam. From what I can tell, many of their games are targeted at the Chinese audience. It sounds strange to bring up, but it is relevant, I promise.
So, how does Chubby Cat play? Well, it's pretty straightforward, honestly. You put islands down on the grid that contain ingredients locked up in trees. You then use a cat 'chef' to liberate the ingredients from the trees and use them to either directly satisfy a waiting cat's hunger, or use those ingredients to make more complex foods that the waiting cats desire. You continue liberating ingredients and satisfying cats until the level's time runs out. There's no real tutorial in this game, but I was able to figure out and describe this game in a handful of sentences. The cat desires start out with ingredients and then become more and more complex foods as you complete levels. Progression to more and more complex puzzles is just about right to get an understanding of before the game asks you to go faster. The artwork is simple and friendly, with all the cats and ingredients being relatively easy to identify at a glance. The music is a perfect complement to the puzzles, being relaxing to promote you to get into the flow of feeding these cats. And although they do have an AI disclosure on the Steam page, it is limited to, and I'm quoting here, "In the game trailer, we use music from StockTune, which provides royalty-free music in the public domain. The music can be freely used, shared, and adapted without payment or attribution." That sounds like the boilerplate from a stock music site to me. It's not great, but unless you're looking for AI-free music explicitly, you're going to run into this sort of disclosure.
Why does this not have any reviews, then? Well, it does have nine, but every single one was from someone who received the game for free and are written in Chinese and are positive. These do technically show up in the reviews list, but from my understanding, they do not impact the review numbers, since they were reviews from someone who got the game for free. On one hand, that makes sense: Free copies given out could easily take a game from no reviews past the 10 review threshold for initial visibility. On the other hand, it's so statistically unlikely to ever reach past the ten review threshold for most studios first game that the conventional wisdom is to have your first game be a learning experience. And woe be upon you if you don't expand your fanbase enough with that first release as to get out of the no review hole. That's to say, Steam is the platform, it's up to you to bring your audience and their attention to your game on that platform. That's not necessarily a bad thing, just a reflection of the reality of releasing on Steam nowadays. And from what I can find from Just L Studio, they put the game out there and did some marketing, but it obviously wasn't enough.
There is one oddity from Chubby Cats that I want to point out. The reviews are all in Chinese. That in and of itself isn't noteworthy, as it is one of the largest markets on Steam, but it brings up a cultural difference that we in the West don't see when we look at Steam: Censorship. In China, most of the ways to get a hold of the developers through Steam are blocked. They can only use the review system to get their attention. If you don't know, one of the reasons Slay The Spire 2 was review bombed was due to the Chinese audience giving no recommendations and then using the review system to give the feedback that normally goes through the Steam community hub. I found this rather fascinating, so I dug into the censorship and cultural norms of Chinese gamers. And from what I could find, they don't typically leave positive reviews on games. They'll leave negative reviews to give feedback to the developer and then almost never update the recommendation. That makes Chubby Cat more interesting, especially when put into this context. The main audience for Just L Studio appears to be Chinese, a group of gamers that does not typically leave positive reviews. And because of that, Chubby Cat may be far more successful than expected. They may have multiples more sales that a comparably reviewed Western game. So, instead of being a sub-ten review game, it actually ends up further up the totem pole and into lesser known puzzle games with dozens of reviews. I struggle to see it being larger than that, however. The concurrent player count never broke the 5 player count. I suspect that it isn't that popular and is still in the no reviews category because of that. If there was a quiet audience, you would expect more than one player on at any given time, not months of no players. I would also expect to see at least one bad review that wasn't gifted a copy.
What could be done to get more eyeballs on this game, then? There's a lot of "wisdom" out there that may or may not be helpful in getting your game in front of your potential audience: Enter into as many festivals as possible to stand out, get a streamer to pick it up and play it for a while, post dev blogs on how you made your game. All of those are ways to get it in front of as many eyes as possible. And the advice can work, if you're persistent enough. I personally follow about a dozen developers who plug their game at least twice a week on their social media. Whatever path you choose to get your game out there, you need to be doing it almost as soon as you have started working on it. Barring putting an idea and not a completed game into a festival, of course. There is a video by Isto, Inc. that takes the conventional wisdom that "experts" like Chris Zukowski use, called the marketing funnel, and flips it on it's head: In the video, which I'll link in the description, they argue that you should be defining success before you even settle on an idea. They then take that definition of success, as defined as a sales target upon release, and walk it back all the way to the ideation stage of game design. Although each step back introduces more uncertainty, it also lowers the definition of success. And using something like this walkback method can help inform what success will look like for each step of the game design journey. Why do I bring up this particular methodology when I started with being persistent? Simple: This can help you define what progress will look like when you reach certain milestones in your game design. And it forces you to consider what you will need to achieve in each step to be considered "on track" for your game's release. And persistence on pushing your game will help you bring your audience to your game when it comes time to release.
That's not to say I entirely agree with all of the "wisdom" in the Isto, Inc. video; I don't. At the prototyping phase, they define success as getting your playtesters "needing" to play your game, and not just saying it's fun. That's an almost useless metric driven by vibes as much as others. And that may end up taking you and your game beyond where you envisioned and offloading the fun parts of game design and decision making onto feedback you're getting from your playtesters. That's not only fraught with issues, it means you won't be making the game you want to in the first place and almost designing by committee. And if you've ever been on a design committee, you'll know what I mean and why that's a bad thing. All the edges will be filed off and you'll end up with another bland as plain oatmeal game. You'll have a much harder time selling a strange attractor if you've gotten rid of all the interesting bits. I'm not saying that the video advocates for it, but that's one of the logical conclusions of that thought process I need to call out. It seems to work for Isto, Inc., though, so what do I know.
What seems to separate the studios that live from the one release and then dead is persistence. And both Just L Studio and Isto, Inc. have released multiple games. And if there's one thing being so enthusiastic about games and game design has taught me, it's that getting a game to done is the first and most important step. I can't count how many games I've played that never made it past prototype and out to the larger audience they so desperately deserved. No matter how you choose to market your game, be persistent and keep plugging it like the devs I follow. You will find a way that works for you if you keep on putting it out there.
Well, that's about all that I have for this examination. If you have any comments, suggestions for other games with no reviews, or anything else, leave a comment below. I always enjoy talking about games and want to hear your thoughts on them, too. If you prefer to use social media, you can find me under @jcsirron. This has been another side quest on games with no reviews on steam for the adventure mechanics. I'll talk to you next time.
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