How Cash Cleaner Simulator hit 100k sales in just one week!

A yummy case study. Also: lots of discovery news.

[The GameDiscoverCo game discovery newsletter is written by ‘how people find your game’ expert & company founder Simon Carless, and is a regular look at how people discover and buy video games in the 2020s.]

We roll on, and we sustain - and look, it’s a fascinating time in the video game biz. So we’re committed to documenting it for you all - the good, the bad, and the ugly. And let’s hit it - with our lead story discussing a viral breakout game on Steam.

But before we start, here’s a fascinating multi-part thread looking at the history of physical arts and crafts (dioramas, clay sculptures) in Japanese video game cover art, 1983-2015. (Did you know Pikmin had a CG cover, but Pikmin 2 was all clay cuties?)

[PLZ DON’T FORGET: signing up to GameDiscoverCo Plus gets more from our second weekly newsletter, Discord access, data & lots more. And companies, get much more ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data access org-wide via GameDiscoverCo Pro, as 60+ have.]

Discovery news: Stellar Blade trends on Steam…

Starting out with our typical game platform and discovery news, we’ve got various bits of goodness for you:

• Looking at GameDiscoverCo's countdown of 'trending' unreleased Steam games by follower velocity from May 12th to 19th, saucy Sony-published action game Stellar Blade is #1 with a bullet. (It's PSN login-optional, but is currently excluded for purchase in non-PSN countries, which is proving controversial. Also, Denuvo.)

• Elsewhere, ‘Papers, Please’-like Quarantine Zone: The Last Check surged even higher to #2, and extraction shooter ARC Raiders (#5) - from the creators of The Finals - has good buzz. Elsewhere: Fantasy Life i (#3) continues the cozy fantasy franchise, & Persona 5: The Phantom X (#4) is a mobile-first F2P spinoff.

• Bryant Francis uses PAX East to dive into the ‘game deprofessionalization’ question: “Wandering through [the bulk of the] booths, I found a mix of truly excellent and inspiring games. But… few of the developers on display were working on teams larger than three people.” Is this a show ROI problem, a market fragmentation issue, or both?

• Data and discovery nerds: Steam has redone its monthly top-release charts as follows: “Expanded to include the 50 top releases of each month (was previously only 20)… a new layout for the chart pages, including browsing by trailers, personalized recommendations, DLC, and filter options.” And they’re tiered, too - check it out!

• Nintendo news: the company will be exhibiting at Gamescom 2025 after a break, mainly because they have a new console to promote; it’s detailed the free Switch 2 updates for 12 of its first-party games, inc. Pokemon Scarlet & Violet. (So there’s free Switch 2 updates, but also $10 and $20 Switch 2 Edition upgrades too? Woo?)

• A ‘meta-take’ on Expedition 33’s success: “There’s an overpowering incentive to identify The Blueprint that allows for consistent, replicable success in game development.” Avi Bhuiyan points out the game is an ‘improbable masterpiece’ and correctly notes the underpants gnomes-like ‘…profit’ formula. Fair.

• A brief Epic vs. Apple drama update: Tim Sweeney says that “Apple didn’t accept or reject our Fortnite [iOS U.S.] submission… [but] said they were going to ignore it” until after a higher court rules on their appeal. Epic told the judge to make ‘em approve it, and now the judge is now plenty mad with Apple. *popcorn*

• ‘Itch.io as a possible feeder for Steam hits’ has been underdiscussed - especially given you can easily prototype multiple ideas there. But HowToMarketAGame just did a good overview of some successful ‘Itch to Steam’ transitions, and adds that having versions free on Itch doesn’t stop a paid version selling on Steam later.

• Microlinks: VRChat - which has a lot of non-VR players - just launched a paid avatar marketplace; April 2025’s top-grossing mobile games are led by Honor Or Kings, LastWar, and Whiteout Survival; Roblox has added in-game shopping for physical items in collaboriation with Shopify.

• An interesting interview with FBC: Firebreak’s game director reveals the upcoming $40 Remedy co-op shooter is pitched to thread the needle between ‘giant GaaS’ and ‘indie’ to make, as he says, “something that respects player time and do[esn]'t try to overcharge.” That in-between space is tricky, but worth exploring.

• Some rapid advances in Quest’s OS are creating issues with developers, with various frame rate and glitching issues appearing. Meta’s CTO Andrew Bosworth notes that a Battery Saver issue is being rolled back, saying: “we've gotta have a stronger set of processes in place for quality control before things go out the door.”

• Esoteric link: here’s a detailed marketing postmortem of how they ‘killed’ the Duolingo owl? Yes, really. (As for the obvious question - why - the biz priority was re-engagement using the app icon change & making “a social-led product moment”. It true: killing characters - hi, Doomsday - def. cuts through the clutter.)

How Cash Cleaner Sim hit 100k sales in one week!

OK, so Mind Control & Forklift/Digital Pajamas/GamerSky’s ‘you’re literally laundering money for shady types’ game Cash Cleaner Simulator ($15) only launched on Steam on May 8th, and already hit 100,000 units sold after just one week. Darn, we’ve got to dig in further!

For context, the game is the #2 new title by Steam units sold in May 2025 so far, according to GDCo data (sandwiched between The Precinct at #3 and DOOM: The Dark Ages at #1), and it accomplished that with ‘only’ 42,000 wishlists at launch.

The duo who run Forklift - Andrei Podoprigora & Tucker Dean - are GDCo Pro clients - and we’d actually had an email conversation with them pre-release, with them noting the wishlists weren’t scaling quite as fast as they wanted. Despite that, we thought they were ‘holding a good poker hand’, hook-wise, for launch virality.

And that virality hit big. Our ‘pre-release interest to results’ ratio for Cash Cleaner Sim is 6.5x the median, one of the highest performers of the month, even compared to other May breakouts like Tower Dominion (4.5x median) & Drop Duchy (2x median.) So what made this happen? Some thoughts on the overall game idea, first:

• CCS is a high-concept twist on mundane ‘simulators’: players know what the ‘X Simulator’ paradigm means - they’re first-person, detail-oriented playacting games. Forklift’s Tucker notes: “there was a lot of debate before we decided to go for it”, because CCS isn’t themed like a vanilla ‘you run a gas station’ fantasy.

• The conceptual upside convinced the publishers to back the game: according to Tucker: “IF the joke landed, it had viral potential. You're laundering money... literally. We considered, for example, if a laundromat sim game would be better. Clear concept, but not funny. We wanted the humorous hook.”

• The concept matters a lot, but you also have to nail execution: Andrei noted of Cash Cleaner Sim, made by a team of ~5 experienced devs, that it has “incredible stickiness, which pushed the median playtime to three times our predictions (current median at 8h+ and still rising).”

The replayability of Cash Cleaner Simulator is key to its word of mouth - and we’ll discuss that shortly. But the biggest reason for its social video virality is that high-hook, ‘naughty naughty’ concept. Influencers love playacting as nefarious money launderers to their audience, who then get evangelized on the game which enjoying it.

Basically: when we chatted to Forklift’s Andrei and Tucker, two other major themes came out. First, the game may have ‘only’ launched with 42,000 Steam wishlists, but they really hustled for those WLs, building them “over six months of tight marketing.”

In fact, Andrei made GameDiscoverCo this annotated wishlist chart - to show the amount of ‘beats’ the team worked through to get interest in place:

The most interesting element of this is probably a ‘surprise’ Christmas-themed early demo - the first sustained organic wishlist spike. Andrei explains: “We first launched the demo in December [2024], which was almost a last-minute decision based on the changes we saw Valve do to Steam Next Fest in October. We realised that waiting to launch the demo in February was too risky, and we knew the playtests were showing great results.

So we took an early "vertical slice" build from April 2024, threw in a few things to make it Christmas-themed, named "Santa's Stash", and launched in the first week of December. This ended up a great decision, as it finally kickstarted organic wishlists coming in daily.”

That was followed by an updated Next Fest demo on February 24th (it made Top 50 in demo CCU), with a release date announce & trailer at IGN Fan Fest at the same time. From there? There was good but not giant traction on TikTok, where “some videos hit hundreds of thousands of organic views, but none crossed the 1M mark.” But then… launch!

Playtesting Cash Cleaner Sim: results & decisions!

We wanted to devote the second part of the newsletter to how the folks at Forklift really lean in to active playtesting, which is a major part of their strategy, and how results affected their strategy. Tucker notes: “We use it to predict the Steam review score, to measure playtimes, to identify how players are finding us… and of course to get feedback.”

They gave us three examples of Steam back-end data around CCS’ ‘time played’ performance. First, stats from some early playtesters via the Steam Playtest feature:

This was a pretty impressive result, albeit with more hardcore fans likely to sign up, and Tucker notes: “Strong median playtime and a big cohort of players playing over 5 hours. At this point, the demo content was completable in like 90 minutes (but open-ended after that!), so we knew this was a great sign.”

The first truly public-facing effort was that Dec. 2024 demo, where “we asked the team to throw a Christmas tree and some special Santa bills in the game - and we launched the demo with the subtitle "Santa's Stash" to create a December marketing beat.”

Between this demo and the subsequent - and much improved - Steam Next Fest & IGN Fan Fest-timed ones, Cash Cleaner Simulator demo stats are as follows:

As Tucker notes: “Median time went down, which was expected. But the cohort of players playing well past the end of the content continued to be super strong.” Still, likely due to how busy the market is, “wishlists were painfully hard to win”, even through this success.

The Forklift folks say this struggle on the wishlist side led them to two decisions:

• A less aggressive pricing model: they launched CCS at $15 (with a 10% discount) because “we needed immediate attachment and impulse buys to keep the game in front of people, and if we could do that we knew we could succeed.”

• Launching the game straight into 1.0 vs. Early Access: the team decided to skip “an EA campaign while adding more content” specifically “to ensure we could win New and Trending placement to get those eyes [on the game].”

Frankly, this makes sense if you think your game is going to have virality among more casual players, who will drop $10-$15 if they see an interesting-looking sim. (Having said that, there’s a range of pricing, some higher, some lower: Supermarket Simulator is $20, and TCG Card Shop Simulator is $13.)

Anyhow, the end results? The current >100k players of Cash Cleaner Sim have a super impressive 8 hours, 22 minutes median playtime in the game:

As for how this compares to other top games in this ‘X Simulator’ space? It’s a little tricky to filter, but here’s a quick hackjob we did by sorting in GameDiscoverCo Pro’s Time Played Explorer for games with >100k Steam sales lifetime-to-date and:

• within the ‘simulator’ Steam tag

• anything with ‘simulator’ in the game name

…and then ignoring the top few games by median hours played, which are almost all farming simulators, flight simulators, and rail simulators, haha. (We consider these adjacent, but not the same subgenre…)

Here’s some of the highlights from this part of the list, sorted by median hours played:

Which is to say - you need a strong idea, but you’re also not going to make it work without an entertaining, replayable game. This is why we’re shouting out Mind Control Games, the game’s dev, specifically before we end.

Why? There’s been so much ‘good idea, mediocre execution’ in the simulator space. And this game really makes it work. Look at some of the YouTube guides for CCS to understand some of the cute ideas and clever game mechanics permeating the title (Banksy-style ‘Hoaxsy’ illustrated notes to collect? Awesome!)

Concluding: sure, Cash Cleaner Simulator selling 100k copies at $15 or local equivalent isn’t necessarily in the ‘everybody gets yachts’ vicinity. GDCo estimates the net (after Steam cut) at about $1 million so far - after a couple of weeks on sale.

But that’s just the start - we could see the game netting $5 million+ on Steam over time (a gross of ~$10m?), even without console versions or paid DLC that would probably add to the pot over time. Which, for a 5 person dev team & boutique publisher, is a tasty result. And 100% indicative of a ‘hit’ in today’s busy biz. Toodles!

[We’re GameDiscoverCo, an analysis firm based around one simple issue: how do players find, buy and enjoy your PC or console game? We run the newsletter you’re reading, and provide real-time data services for publishers, funds, and other smart game industry folks.]