A game called Bongo Cat has been consistently appearing at the top of Steam’s concurrent players chart in the last few months, sitting alongside long-time heavy-hitters like Counter-Strike 2 and PUBG in the top five. Yet despite regularly attracting over 150,000 concurrents, the game doesn’t actually make any money, its developer has revealed in a recent interview.
Marcel Zurawka is the CEO and co-founder of Irox Games, the studio behind Bongo Cat. In a recent interview with Eurogamer, Zurawka pulled back the curtain on the game’s viral success, revealing that the high player numbers haven’t translated to income for the studio.
“Some people said, ‘Oh you’re now rich.’ That’s bullshit. I didn’t make it for the money at all,” Zurawka said. “So the first month of March, we made $2000 net, after Steam cuts and everything.” He shares all of Bongo Cat’s monthly income–$4050 for April, the peak of the game’s virality, $3800 in May, and down to $2800 for June so far.
“It’s not even paying a developer for us,” he adds. “If you just look at the numbers, it’s actually losing us money in the end.”
Bongo Cat is a free idle game that’s really more of a desktop app than an actual game. It puts a little cat on top of your task bar, who taps his paws on a counter for every key press and mouse click. Bongo Cat can discover different hats as the counter goes up, and these items can be traded on Community Marketplaces for real money–which has also resulted in elevated bot activity in the game.
Zurawka says that the money made from marketplace transactions is generally less than half of Bongo Cat’s total income, with the bulk of its sales coming from paid cat skins available in the game as microtransactions.
Making money was never the goal of Bongo Cat, however. “I want to have it as an easy companion tool for everybody and don’t want anyone to pay anything,” Zurawka explains. “For me, it should always be as accessible as possible. I don’t want to pay-wall anything.”
The game’s success has had a different kind of positive impact on the studio, however, acting as a marketing tool that’s driven views and wishlists for the studio’s next title in development, Oku.
