They Built a Game to Get Hired. It Sold 1.5 Million Copies

Featured photo: The WASD keys, the controls players demanded in Shape of Dreams’ very first build. Photo: Santeri Viinamäki, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

When Eunseop Shim and Kipyo Kang started their game in January 2023, it was a project meant to give them “one decent piece of work to show when applying for jobs.” The two were computer science students, and the sales target they set was 3,000 copies. That game, Shape of Dreams, sold 1.5 million copies within a year of launch (GameVu, October 1, 2026; Game Chosun report on NDC 26).

Korea’s game industry is dominated by the online and mobile games of giants like Nexon and NCSoft. Inside that market, a four-person team’s PC game took home both the Indie Game Award and the Excellent Developer Award at the 2025 Korea Game Awards (GameVu, November 2025). It’s also a job market where Korean companies have been cutting new developer hiring and buying AI tokens instead.

Hoping for 3,000, they sold 100,000 in a day

The gap between target and result is 500 times. After its Steam launch in September 2025, Shape of Dreams sold 100,000 copies in 24 hours and 300,000 in its first week (CGM, September 2025). It passed 500,000 in two weeks, with peak concurrent players topping 45,000 (Dailian, October 9, 2025). In January 2026, publisher Neowiz announced a million copies, about three and a half months after launch (Worthplaying, January 7, 2026), and in September, with the console release, it announced 1.5 million (Electronic Times, September 18, 2026). The Steam list price is $24.99. Simply multiplied at full price, that comes to about $37 million, but that’s before discounts, platform fees and taxes, so it isn’t actual revenue. The game has 16,653 Steam recommendations (Steam store API, checked November 7, 2026).

At launch, the studio, Lizard Smoothie, was four people: CEO Shim, director Kang and two artists (Dailian). Now it has five and is incorporated (GameVu). Shim’s reaction was short: “Honestly, I never thought it would sell this much.”

Also read: There Are No Seats Left at the Online Temple Where You Can't Talk to Anyone

They built the game they lost

It started with a loss. Shim was a devoted fan of Blizzard’s MOBA (a 5v5 team battle game) Heroes of the Storm, and when its updates stopped, he felt hollow. When he moved over to League of Legends, the barrier to entry and the stress of fighting other people were too much (Dailian). So they decided to take the fun of MOBA controls and pour it into a roguelite (a genre where you start over from scratch every time you die and combine different abilities each run) that you could play alone or with up to three friends.

What felt like a hobby project changed direction when it won in the student category of the Global Indie Game Development Competition (GIGDC). The pair got mentoring, walked the floor at Tokyo Game Show, the first game show of their lives, and came away dreaming of releasing a commercial game (GameVu).

The first build got roasted, and the data hurt more

Most of the feedback on the first build they posted on the indie platform Stove in 2023 stung. The MOBA-style mouse-only movement drew a flood of complaints: “It’s a roguelite, so why doesn’t it support WASD?” (Dailian). The team reluctantly added WASD controls, and the numbers delivered the verdict. About 40% of players used the default MOBA controls, 55% used WASD, and 5% used the RPG-style controls added at the same time. The team cut the RPG controls (Game Chosun, NDC 26).

The data exposed the difficulty problem too. The team had brushed off “too hard” as grumbling from casual players who tried the demo and left. But the death rate in the first world, the Turbulent Forest, was 45%, and in the lava zone it was 50% (Game Chosun). When players said the linear map was boring, they spent three months rebuilding the map structure from scratch. Shim remembers that time this way: “I didn’t even have time to play the game myself, and I was terrified: what if we built it like this and it fails?” (Dailian).

The free demo was updated close to 70 times over about two years (Game Chosun). In the demo’s early days, 80% of players came from China (Dailian).

They fixed a bug and the players got mad

Those Chinese players changed the character of the game. During the demo, China’s community discovered an infinite parry build: the character Mist could parry even the damage she dealt to herself and become invincible. The team saw it as a bug and fixed it. The backlash was so fierce that they hurriedly rolled back the patch and made an exception that lets players parry self-inflicted damage only (AUTOMATON interview, September 20, 2026). After that, Lizard Smoothie set a rule: if a “broken build” is hard to put together, it’s fun the players found, and the team respects it. Hooked, loyal players ended up acting as the QA team the company didn’t have (Game Chosun).

A ten-sentence pitch and cold emails

At the end of 2023, with about half of the launch build finished, the two sent cold emails to several publishers. The one that signed them was Neowiz, the publisher of Lies of P. At the first meeting, when the publisher’s rep asked for the game’s core keywords, Shim explained it in more than ten sentences. The answer was blunt: it lacked personality, narrative and a reason to keep playing (Dailian). Kang sums up that relationship like this: “Development is just one of the 20 things you need to ship. The publisher supports the other 19.”

The Steam strategy Shim shared at NDC 26 didn’t cost much either. Traditional large-scale marketing didn’t work on Steam as well as expected. What worked better was catching visibility at every store page reveal, demo release and launch, and showing up steadily at genre festivals and Steam Next Fest (Game Chosun). Not every Korean indie’s demo story ends this well: one solo developer saw his game cloned in China before launch.

Right after launch, Shim named one more goal. “I’d kept saying I wanted us to become Korea’s Supergiant Games, but I wasn’t even sure it was possible. Now I think there’s at least a 1% chance” (Dailian). Supergiant Games is the American studio that made Hades with a small team. Two students who once wanted a single portfolio piece for their job applications now have the studio behind Hades as their next target.

Where to play: Shape of Dreams on Steam ($24.99 in the U.S., checked November 7, 2026).

Sources

• GameVu, October 1, 2026: email interview with Eunseop Shim, “From a job-hunting project to 1.5 million copies” (Korean)
• Game Chosun, June 17, 2026: NDC 26 session report (Korean)
• Dailian, October 9, 2025: interview (Korean)
• Electronic Times, September 18, 2026: console release and 1.5 million copies (Korean)
• Worthplaying, January 7, 2026: one million copies
• CGM, September 2025: 300,000 in the first week, CGM: 100,000 in 24 hours
• AUTOMATON, September 20, 2026: developer interview (Japanese)
• GameVu: 2025 Korea Game Awards (Korean)
• Shape of Dreams on Steam (released September 10, 2025 U.S. time, $24.99, 16,653 recommendations, checked November 7, 2026)
• $37 million is a simple 1.5 million × $24.99, not actual revenue.