The $17.5m Indie Failure You've Never Heard Of

0:01 Have you ever heard of the indie game Starlight Revolver? If you don't recognize that name, that's fine. There are a lot of indie games out there. But what if I told you this indie game had a budget of $17.5 million with none of that money coming from Kickstarter? This indie game had over a 100,000 wish lists, broke into the top 10 most played demos of Steam NextFest 2025, and had big streamers like Sea Dog VA and Iron Mouse both lined up to play at Anime NYC. Their team had employees from Riot Games, Capcom, Ubisoft, and their music had people working on it as big as Kerob Bonito, Iris, and Lily Pichu. All of this put towards an early access release player peak of only 499 players, a peak they would never come close to beating for the rest of the lifetime of the

0:46 game. And even worse, this wasn't a single player game releasing to lower player accounts. This was a game intended to be MMO like with live service. The reception was so bad that they had to announce the shutdown of the game only 3 months later. And leading up to that, they were dealing with suspicions of implementing crypto, AI, and pulling strings to get their funding in the first place. So, how do you start with $17.5 million, a killer team, tons of big collaborations, but shut down in 3 months? Let's find out. First, I want to get ahead of the people thinking that I'm the one defining them as an indie studio. They actually say this about themselves in their Gamescom exhibition description. They say they are a New Yorkbased indie team of game developers. And since they mentioned Starlight Revolver, this was their description after they started

1:32 developing that game, which will mean more in a little bit. Before the game was released, the CEO, Daniel Zo, made a Reddit post in GameDev about what he learned after first revealing his game to the world. This was a post broadly talking about the funding, how they took feedback, and how they pivoted ideas. But what the commenters immediately caught on to was in the line about the funding. I went off savings for the first year, then raised 2 million in year two and 15 million in year three from venture capital. Daniel's post was very quickly overshadowed by the fact that they raised $2 million just a year after starting game development. Not only just starting game development, but from the title, Daniel says he started learning game development 3 years ago. This pace is absolutely unprecedented in the indie game scene, where people often develop games from a capital investment

2:19 of zero dollars, all the money coming out of their own savings until the game releases. Starlight Revolver somehow got $2 million only a year after the CEO started learning about game development, and $15 million more a year after that. From his comments, this screenshot is from the build that he used to get that first round of funding. It's a very simple looking demo, nothing that would make someone think that it should get $2 million. So, people dug deeper and they found that this wasn't the story of just Starlight Revolver, but also another game called Houseion Zero. The developer mentions that Hion Zero was the first version of Starlight Revolver after they were called out about their incredible level of funding. And if you go looking, you can see the types of people who invested into it. The primary investor is Jonathan Lie, a partner of Andre

3:04 Horowitz, a venture capital firm that invests into many things including AI and crypto. People even found the post from Entre Horowits specifically about Houseion Zero. In this post, you can find why they cared about PO Labs, the company that Daniel Zo founded. And Treason Horowitz is leading the series A and P Labs, a game studio building a next generation anime RPG, Hion Zero, alongside a UGC platform for players to create their own anime style mods and worlds. We're very excited about the potential for AI assisted UGC to transform IP into dynamic neverending game franchises. This was how Zero, PO Labs, and Daniel Zo got their funding. While this post was talking about the larger chunk of $15 million that the company raised, it's not too far of a stretch to imagine that this was the

3:49 pitch that also got the initial $2 million. And that's because to get $2 million, you would have had to have sold investors on the idea that they would eventually get their money back and more. An MMO, especially from an indie company with only one year of game development experience at the time, would have no other chance of getting that funding. MMOs are notoriously risky, even for big companies, as shown by a titan like Amazon shutting down theirs. To get $2 million, Daniel Zo was not just staunchly defending a few strong ideas or pivoting during game development, like he implies in the post. He was selling the idea that his company would create anime Roblox, a platform to create AI assisted userenerated content. Now, if you compare the $17.5 million they raised to the net worth of Roblox, you can see why companies were willing to put in what

4:35 seems like a pittance for the chance that this becomes even a fraction as big. People also found that to get these connections in the first place, Daniel Zo had a job history at Jump Trading LLC, building their cryptocurrency trading product, Robin Hood, specifically working on crypto among other things, and as an angel investor into many different ventures, including NEO, who in turn invested back into PO Labs. All of this went directly against the idea of the post, which seemed to position themselves as a small indie company that pulled themselves up by the bootstraps. When in reality, Daniel Zo had many connections to venture capital that other developers wouldn't have. Later in 2025, Daniel Zo would post again in gamedev with the same style of post, this time calling themselves the solo dev that raised $2 million. They talk about how they spent weeks of competitive research and iteration on

5:20 their animatic and advertising on Tik Tok by stepping out of their comfort zone. And at the bottom, there's a vague paragraph recommending devs not get discouraged by the negativity around the funding side and how if you build a truly impressive prototype relative to your resources, I believe there are investors and publishers out there that will be interested in your project. I would like to remind you that this screenshot was their prototype they said they had around the time we had raised the $2 million and that their largest investor Andre Horowitz explicitly calls out AI assisted anime UGC as a reason they invested in Po Labs something completely absent in their entire post that was supposedly more about our story. The reaction in the comments correctly pointed out the reality and that was that Daniel Zo was lying by omission about how they got the investor

6:06 attention and what they promised to those investors. It wasn't just the game they were promising anime Roblox. And all this might bring you to ask why does this matter? Because while true Daniel lied about how the company grew, but the game really did get 100,000 wish lists and also got all those employees from other big companies. I gave you all that context because both of these posts were meant to advertise the game as shown by the links to the game in both of them. And instead of doing that successfully, it made people uncover a lot of stuff that would drag down the game's reputation forever. Connections to AI and crypto through the CEO would fuel rumors of the company's plans for the game. In fact, it was so persistent that the CEO had to make their own posts on the Steam community, rebutting each and every one of those points. This was in response not only to the Reddit threads where people investigated, but also this

6:52 enormous Steam discussion compiling all of this information for people to read. This discussion got 99 awards and generated 139 comments of responses before the moderators locked the thread from any further participation. If you Googled Starlight Revolver Steam in the month after that thread was created in June 2025, your first result is that thread absolutely trashing the game. If you Googled it in the days until just before the game was released in August 27th, just below the game itself, you would get that thread. For almost two months after the discussion was first created, people were going on to Google and immediately finding a thread that had only negative things to reveal about the game. Even though the CEO would later rebut the idea that the game has crypto or AI or anything like that, it took 2 months before that response would be made. And this was 2 days after the

7:37 game had already been released. On top of that, the post was to a much smaller audience. As evidenced by the number of awards and comments, only 35 and 17 respectively. And also, as a lesser point, the 99 awards the original discussion got were primarily made up of positive awards, not the clown award that was generally used to make fun of threads. This points towards that thread having a positive reception and people seeing it as truthful, accurate, or helpful. The reputation that Starlet Revolver had accumulated around itself is what I believe to be the reason it launched to only 499 players despite its wishless count. and being a top 10 most played demo in Steam NextFest 2025. If you look through every single game that has been released and placed near Starlight Revolver in Steam NextFest, you can easily find that every single

8:22 one of them beats out Starlight Revolver across many other genres that do not demand as strong of a player base as an MMO. There is no other reasonable explanation that I can conjure that would explain an at best 0.5% conversion rate of wish lists to peak player count in an MMO. Even though the game had a bad launch gameplay-wise as well, which I will discuss soon, 100,000 wish lists and a top 10 most played demo in that month should have led more players to playing on launch purely on hype alone. But I believe that this reputation of being possibly a crypto game or a game made with AI assets, all from the rumors based on the past history of the CEO was what turned people off before the game even launched. However, I do not want to give the impression that the reputation alone was what sank the game. For 499 players who did get into the game on launch, the scene was not pretty. If you

9:09 know what this music is, you know what is coming. If you don't, just enjoy the ride. >> Um, connection errors. Unable to dash across a gap. All the rogike currency going away. Can't join Q. Negative Rogike currency. Out of bounds. Out of bounds. Out of bounds. Becoming the void. Connection lost. By the way, there was no bug reporting channel in the Discord on launch. And the bug reporting in game was bugged. Connection dropped and turned into nothing. Stuck at character select. No way to change keybinds. Unbeatable tutorial. Stuck on the title screen. And just for good luck, one more connection failure for an MMO with 499 players on their server. Yeah, this is how they ended up using their $17.5 million budget. As you can

9:55 see in their October Steam post, they were already planning to turn the game into a single player experience alongside rebranding the game as Starlight Revolver Ignite. But in November, they announced the imminent shutdown of the game with the single player experience ending up as their plan for the shutdown. And that's how the game is today. An MMO turned into a solo offline experience. I don't know if there's any grand lesson to be learned here. Maybe don't lie about how your game got started, then go silent for 2 months while negative theories fester in your community. Doesn't exactly roll off the tongue. This game really did look beautiful. I'm sure the creatives put in their all to make the game look as good as it does. But in the end, it was all dragged down by a CEO trying to drum up more attention for the game instead of spending the money to make it a more fun experience. At least it wasn't money from the fans through Kickstarter this time. That's a relief.