If what Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier says is true and making an indie game is like buying a lottery ticket, Meccha Chameleon has hit the jackpot. It seems uncontestable as the friendslop hit of the year now, with over 15 million copies sold in less than a month. Developer lemorion_1224 thanked players for all the attention in a Steam community blog post. “Thanks a million,” the post reads. “Get ready for a new collaboration with a famous Japanese star next week!”
Who could it be? I’d have to brush up on my contemporary famous Japanese stars to hazard an educated guess, but my uneducated guess would be the vocaloid Hatsune Miku given that she’s crossed over with everything from Fortnite to Sonic the Hedgehog to Magic: the Gathering. Being not a real person seems to open up one’s schedule quite a bit. That, and they could rebrand the game as ‘Miku Chameleon.’
PC Gamer’s Wes Fenlon pointed out last week that, considering the game’s absurdly short 2-month development timeline, developer lemorion_1224 has earned $1 million per day of work. I’ve tried to land a similar rate in my own career, but it’s never gone over well.
I suppose if there’s a lesson here, it’s that all the time and money in the world can’t manufacture the success you’ll find by being in the right place at the right time. It helps to have a great game, too, of course: PC Gamer’s Lincoln Carpenter scored Meccha Chameleon an 82% in his review, calling it “fantastically satisfying … particularly if you have an impish streak.” It’s a bit janky, but it was made by just two people and is priced at just $6, so it is perhaps hard to complain.
