Zurich, Switzerland - June 23, 2023 - After an amazingly successful early access period, the Vampire Survivors-like Arena Shooter Brotato by Blobfish launches its 1.0 version on Steam today with a 20% launch discount.
The success of Brotato came as a surprise, especially for its developer Thomas Gervraud, also known as Blobfish. Before the game’s early access release, Thomas was unsure about his future as an indie game developer, as his two previous games had only found moderate success. Maybe making games about potatoes was just not going to cut it?
While working on Brotato, he had started to look for a job in case things didn't work out. However, three turned out to be Blobfish’s lucky number. After working on the demo for Brotato (his third game) for only three months, things started to take off. Brotato’s demo found a huge audience during its participation in the "Going Rogue: A Festival of Persistence" and "June Next Fest" events on Steam, garnering 40,000 wishlists for the game before its early access launch.
After its early access release, the game remained popular with streamers and continued to extend its reach. As of today, Brotato has sold over 2 million copies on Steam, maintaining an ‘Overwhelmingly positive’ rating at a $5 price point.
Quote from Thomas Gervraud about his design goals with Brotato:
“My goal with Brotato is to appeal to a very specific niche of people by combining mechanics from a few different genres, mainly the survivor-likes with hordes of enemies to fight off and autochess games with a shop allowing the player to create unique builds through weapon synergies and combinations. Everything is glued together by a hand drawn artstyle and a potato theme.”
For its 1.0 release, many new features have been added to the game, such as new characters, weapons, items and bosses. All these expansions further increase the huge amount of combinations and play styles in the game.
Potato fans can jump right back into the bullet hell playing as a Golem drilling into its enemies, a Cryptid with claws or a King wielding Excalibur.
Thanks to Brotato’s success, Thomas is now making plans to build up a team around Blobfish. Even with all the changes happening in the studio, some things stay the same as Thomas claims that the studio’s future games are very likely to remain potato-themed.
Key Features
- Auto-firing weapons by default with a manual aiming option
- Fast runs (under 30 minutes)
- Over 40 characters available to customize your runs
- Hundreds of items and weapons to choose from (flamethrowers, SMGs, rocket launchers or sticks and stones)
- Survive waves lasting 20 to 90 seconds each and kill off as many aliens as you can during that time
- Collect materials to gain experience and get items from the shop between waves of enemies
- Accessibility options: tweak the health, damage and speed of enemies so the difficulty is right for you
About Blobfish
Thomas Gervraud aka Blobfish is a solo developer from France who started making small potato rogue-lite games right after finishing his studies in late 2018. Blobfish published three commercial games so far: Space Gladiators, Lost Potato and more recently Brotato, whose success has allowed him to set up an actual studio and now he’s looking forward to expanding his team!
Article by: Susan N.
