Designed in just a few weeks, this $5 indie game about digging a hole has journeyed to the centre of Steam’s top sellers chart

Many aspects of game development are variable and subjective, but there is one universal truth: games take ages to make. The average turnaround for a big-budget video game used to be four years, but lately that has grown to five, maybe even six years as games have ballooned in size, budget and visual complexity. Even for smaller indie projects, you’re generally looking at two years as a minimum baseline, and I imagine there are a few exhausted indie devs who would roll their panda eyes at that.

Hence, the idea of a developer making a game and launching a game in a matter of weeks would seem utterly absurd. And that’s before you ponder the brain-exploding notion of it selling by the bucketload. Yet that’s exactly what German studio Cyberwave has done, with the release of A Game About Digging a Hole.

As subtly hinted by its title, A Game About Digging a Hole sees you carving a great big pit in your small back garden. Starting off with a trowel, you tunnel downward through the soil, collecting ores and other items as you go, before selling those resources on your computer to purchase more advanced digging tools, like a hand drill and dynamite.

That’s pretty much it, but this miniature adventure seems to have captured the imagination of players on Steam. Not only have they awarded it a “Very Positive” rating with over 3,000 reviews, but they’ve also catapulted it into the platform’s top sellers list, with A Game About Diggging A Hole outranking Dynasty Warriors: Origins at the time of writing.

How was this miracle achieved? Well, AGADAH (I’m not sure if that’s better or worse than writing out the entire name) was designed by Cyberwave’s artist, known by the community simply as Ben. Ben’s full-time job is working on the survival game Solarpunk, but according to AGADAH’s first Steam update, he took a holiday and spent the bulk of it making this new game. “Instead of taking a break, he created this game entirely in his spare time-–in just 14 days,” Cyberwave writes.

The game was built using some existing voxel terrain technology originally designed for Solarpunk, but subsequently discarded. Ben, who is apparently a big fan of the game Motherload, picked up the tech and decided to make a digging game with it, featuring “randomly spawning” ores and upgradeable shovels. “And so, it began. Licensed assets, no long prototyping phases, and a fully functional game emerged in record time” Cyberwave writes.

A Game About Digging a Hole was formally announced in December last year, quickly gaining over 100,000 wishlists. Then, according to a post by Ben on the game’s official X account, after “3 weeks of hard work” he felt ready to announce a release date of February 12. Cyberwave hasn’t revealed the precise number of copies sold, but given the amount of reviews, where it rests on the Steam charts, and how quickly it’s gained traction we can safely assume it’s quite a few.

There are several mitigating factors to the success of AGADAH. It’s built upon tech that presumably took a while to design, and Cyberwave has a heavily established following through Solarpunk, which itself cracked 400,000 wishlists in April last year. Nonetheless, it’s a fascinating anomaly in an industry known for lengthy development times and astronomical budgets, one from which there may be a few lessons worth learning.