The Unlikely Smash Hit of 'A Game About Digging A Hole' by Cyberwave & Rokaplay

With over 5 million views on TikTok, 2.2 million views on YouTube Shorts and 14.5 million views on Instagram reels, A Game About Digging A Hole is a viral gaming sensation published by indie label rokaplay Bou-tique. We spoke to the German cozy games publisher about the hit. Revenues have already passed the one million mark.

Even Robert Kaiser (Managing Director) and Adrian Kaiser (Head of Communications and 'Marketing Dude') at rokaplay probably didn't expect A Game About Digging A Hole to be such a huge success. The game, which had almost 7,500 concurrent users on Steam on 9 February and costs around €5, performed surprisingly well in a competitive environment against Kingdom Come: Deliverance II and Sid Meier's Civilization VII.

'A Game About Digging A Hole' was created by Ben B. while testing terraforming and digging mechanics. He is one of two developers at Cyberwave in Essen, Germany, who are working on the upcoming Solarpunk, which is currently number 41 on Steam's list of most wishlisted games. "Although too complex for such a small team, the core mechanics were already functional so the artist had the idea of combining these mechanics with randomly spawning ores and shovel upgrade options. This led to the quick development of a 3D digging minigame, built on a proven concept without requiring lengthy prototypes or testing phases," the publisher said. Developed during the artist's holidays and using licensed assets to save development time, A Game About Digging A Hole was created in less than a month. We spoke to Adrian Kaiser from rokaplay about this unlikely success.

GamesMarkt: How happy are you with the launch of "A Game About Digging A Hole"?

Adrian Kaiser: "We're beyond happy! We announced the game on December 10, initially aiming for 10,000 wishlists. By launch, we had hit 140,000 wishlists, far beyond our expectations."

GamesMarkt: Can you go into a little bit more detail on the key metrics and explain what marketing measures you took to draw attention to the game?

Adrian Kaiser: "A Game About Digging A Hole was developed entirely by Ben, one of the two developers behind Solarpunk, over the course of 3 to 4 weeks. He used a voxel technology that was initially tested for Solarpunk but later abandoned. By release, the game had 140,000 wishlists, all gathered within roughly eight weeks. Just five days after launch, it had already sold 220,000 copies on Steam.

For marketing, I focused on the hook. I knew that if we managed to make an impact on social media, the press would follow. I didn’t expect it to explode the way it did. Our clips went viral everywhere. After that, things snowballed and everyone wanted to talk about the game. Plus, December is a quiet month for new releases, which worked in our favor. Even IGN picked up on it and shared it across all their channels without us even reaching out."

GamesMarkt: How did everything come together for 'A Game About Digging A Hole', given that Cyberwave is also working on 'Solarpunk'?

Adrian Kaiser: "Ben developed the game entirely on his own during his vacation and weekends. He couldn’t let go of the voxel technology idea they had tested for Solarpunk, so he built a gameplay system inspired by the Flash game Motherload, wrapped it in a small but intriguing mystical storyline and ran with it. When he showed us the game, I think he expected us to reject it. But we loved it. The only challenge was figuring out where it fit into our timeline."

GamesMarkt: How is Rokaplay currently positioned as a publisher and what is the role of Cozy Games in all this?

Adrian Kaiser: "As a publisher, we specialize in cozy and family-friendly games. Over the years, we have refined our strategy, choosing to focus on fewer but stronger projects while building an entire ecosystem around cozy games. This includes:

• A Cozy Games newsletter with a 55 percent open rate
• A Cozy & Family Friendly Games Celebration Steam event, regularly featured by Valve
• Strong connections with content creators, including our Head of Social Media, who is a cozy games creator herself with 100k plus followers on Instagram (Cozy Reni)
• With our rokaplay Bou·tique brand, we aim to release more small, unique games like A Game About Digging A Hole in the future."

GamesMarkt: What are you planning for 2025 besides the release of 'Solarpunk'?

Adrian Kaiser: Next up is the release of Sugardew Island – Your Cozy Farm Shop, followed by Solarpunk and our Cozy & Family Friendly Games Celebration on Steam, where we are also organizing our first ever showcase around the event.

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