After his city builder flopped in early access, Firewatch’s Nels Anderson didn’t give up: ‘Smarter people than me … probably would’ve pulled the plug’

After Generation Exile launched in early access on Steam last fall, game designer Nels Anderson—also known for Firewatch and Mark of the Ninja—was left scratching his head. The space ark city builder had been wishlisted thousands of times, but sold only a few hundred copies.

“I spent 7 years making Generation Exile, a solarpunk city-builder,” Anderson wrote on Reddit just after the early access launch. “Trailers in PC Gaming Show June ’24 & ’25. Top 70 most played demo during our Next Fest. Did all the things you’re supposed to. Launched in early access last week with over 35,000 wishlists. So far, we’ve sold fewer than 300 copies.”

Anderson is careful to say that he never felt entitled to a hit game. “At no point, then or now or fucking ever … do I feel that we are owed a particular response,” the designer told PC Gamer on a recent call. He just wanted to understand what happened, given the signs had been so positive.

One part of his hypothesis is early access fatigue, and Anderson now also wonders if Generation Exile is “a little bit too strange to be recognizable, but a little bit too recognizable to be strange.” It’s a weird game, he says (you may end up surrendering your water supply to capybaras), but perhaps not in a way that makes it obviously stand out in an environment where getting attention for anything is a struggle: “It just ended up feeling kind of fuzzy.”

Whatever the reasons for Generation Exile’s struggle to sell, Anderson and Sonderlust Studios didn’t give up on it. Despite slim chances of earning the development costs back, the team has spent the past half-year completing Generation Exile’s final two story chapters, adding a new biome, fixing bugs, and overhauling the production management UI.

“Smarter people than me would have, after like a week of response in early access, they probably would have pulled the plug, if I’m being honest,” Anderson said on our call. But he’s “not wired that way,” and felt the studio had a responsibility to complete what it had promised for those who did take a chance on Generation Exile. The game currently has 31 user reviews on Steam, with a positive average.

“I think that, given the intensity, competitiveness, whatever of the current moment, that some people are letting their analysis swing way closer to, ‘Just barf something out, and if it doesn’t immediately catch fire, just cut bait and go on to the next thing,'” Anderson said.

There’s a poetic irony to the situation: The focus on short-term return that Anderson is criticizing—”mortgaging the present at the expense of the future”—is one of the inspirations for Generation Exile, whose primary theme is sustainability. Players are tasked with returning a generation ship that’s “teetering on the rim of collapse” to equilibrium.

In the world of game development rather than spaceship ecology, Anderson worries about what’s being lost due to that ‘catch fire or cut bait’ attitude, as well as the kind of game design it encourages.

“So much of the experience ends up being about … encouraging you to keep coming back and spending more time with [the game],” he said. “Is that really for the player’s benefit, or is it just to not let this thing out of your attention, out of your psyche, even if it’s not really providing you with something novel or interesting anymore? That, to me at least, feels like another [case of], ‘How do we maximize the short term at the expense of the long term?’ I don’t love it.”

Generation Exile hits 1.0 on April 17, and is available on Steam for $30. Jon checked it out after its early access release and had positive feelings. He also learned that “the human body is equivalent in mass to 50,000 crickets.”