Dressmaker's 482,000 sales expose an underserved games market

By Amara Osei

Video Game Insights estimates that Dressmaker sold more than 482,000 units since its September 21 release on Steam, while maximum daily concurrent users rose from just under 8,000 on day one to more than 43,000 on day 14.

Its curve broke the usual launch pattern. Concurrency reached just over 35,000 on day seven and continued climbing. Free Lives ran no paid marketing in the West; Jonathan Hau-Yoon said some content creators in China were paid, while most players came from North America and Europe.

Dressmaker had three full-time and three part-time developers at South African developer and publisher Free Lives. Hau-Yoon, who previously worked on the strategy title Terra Nil, said: “We definitely thought the game would do well, but maybe in the top three or four games that Free Lives has made before, instead of the astronomical success that it has had.”

Sabrina Becker, an expert dressmaker in real life and a member of the game team, attributed the momentum to players sharing their creations. Visible enthusiasm brought non-players in, and their own dresses then prompted more sharing.

What kept players playing?

Among nearly 200 playtesters, median playtime reached 30 hours. Some played for more than 400 hours, despite the team not having 400 hours of content; Hau-Yoon considered the median unusually high for a normal game.

Players used Discord to invent their own themes and challenges. In one case, a player created an heirloom dress, exported the file and passed it to another player to continue. The game never built that sequence in, but its recorded changes traced the dress across generations.

Who did Dressmaker reach?

At a company party in December the previous year, Free Lives' founder congratulated the team after speaking with several people's girlfriends who said they did not play games but wanted to play Dressmaker. Becker called that response the target audience.

Free Lives does not collect player analytics for the game, so it cannot verify the audience split. Its social following offers only an indicator: 85% of followers are women.

Becker said: “I feel like it's such a massively underserved market in the gaming industry.” She also called the industry's view of what games could reach a limited one. Hau-Yoon believes more indie studios should pursue the opportunity because a game that finds its audience can pay off substantially.

Her argument is practical, not ideological: many women do not play because suitable games do not exist, rather than because of inherent gender bias for or against games. She pointed to the 1990s and 2000s, when household PCs and CD-ROMs carried Barbie and dress-up games for a less gender-divided audience than she sees now.

Becker said those games largely disappeared, aside from occasional exceptions, leaving a major commercial opportunity unused. Her argument echoed Piers Harding-Rolls of Ampere Analysis in a prior GamesIndustry.biz analysis.

How did a dress game begin?

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Hau-Yoon searched for costume-design and fashion games to show Becker while they were stuck at home. She found the mechanics shallow or felt disrespected as a player. Monster Hunter World became a favorite for its dressing-up feature, but Hau-Yoon considered the absence of meticulous clothing creation ridiculous.

The original target was personal, not a market thesis. Hau-Yoon recalled Becker's fixation on clothing and construction, her self-made dress, their early dates watching poor films with excellent costumes, and her attention to costume changes as story foreshadowing. The team set out to make the specific game she could not find.

How did the design become playable?

Building a dress from scratch required a many-tiered process that Hau-Yoon described as tedious and repetitive. The team had to simplify that work for entertainment while preserving the fantasy of making clothes accurately.

Hau-Yoon said a real-world subject can be easier than an invented one because developers can study the actual object and filter what matters. That helped Dressmaker come together fairly easily after refinement, though its memorable heirloom sequence emerged from players rather than the core design.

What happens next?

The Steam release remains PC-only, a platform that can feel non-intuitive and expensive for people outside gaming. Hau-Yoon considers Dressmaker ideal for mobile and Switch, but both require more money and effort than Steam. Free Lives has almost always taken console projects to Steam first for faster iteration.

Ports are now in progress. A programmer is handling the work in-house, with the team aiming for interactions that feel native to each platform. Hau-Yoon said it will take time and carries no self-imposed pressure or deadline.

Free Lives will support Dressmaker with free updates; longer-term ideas remain unsettled. Becker said an online competition mode is in development. Requests for a hat-making game have already arrived; one Free Lives employee spent three years at millinery school. A Hatmaker game remains possible, but the team has made no promises.

The next test is operational: whether Free Lives can convert that unusually durable Steam audience into mobile and Switch ports, then hold it through free updates and competition. Until the studio sets dates, port announcements and the update schedule are the market signals worth watching.