“It’s such a massively underserved market in the gaming industry” – The creators of Dressmaker on why more games should be aimed at women

You may have seen enthusiastic posts about Dressmaker doing the rounds on social media. It’s yet another example of an indie game blowing up on Steam, seemingly out of nowhere: Video Game Insights estimates that Dressmaker has sold over 482,000 units since its release on September 21.

Jonathan Hau-Yoon, who is part of the Dressmaker team at South African developer/publisher Free Lives, and who previously worked on the strategy title Terra Nil, says he was surprised at the scale of the game’s success. “We definitely thought the game would do well,” he tells GamesIndustry.biz, “but maybe in the top three or four games that Free Lives has made before, instead of the astronomical success that it has had.”

The really interesting thing about Dressmaker’s success, however, is that the number of players just kept on growing after launch, rather than following the usual pattern of an initial spike followed by a tapered decline. On day one, the game’s maximum daily concurrent user (CCU) count was just under 8,000, according to Video Game Insights. But by day seven, that figure had leapt up to just over 35,000, and by day 14, it had reached more than 43,000. And remarkably, all of this was done without paid marketing (in the West at least; Hau-Yoon says some content creators in China were paid, although he notes the majority of the game’s players are in North America and Europe).

“A lot of it is just that people are having so much fun playing it, and they’re sharing so much of what they’re doing,” says Sabrina Becker, who is an expert dressmaker in real life as well as being part of the team behind the game, which consists of three full-time and three part-time developers. “And in that sharing, that real joyful enthusiasm seems to be coming through. So many people are seeing that and they say, ‘I also want to play and have fun and make pretty dresses’. And then they play and then they also share what they’ve made. And it just feels like a little bit of a snowball in the best way possible.”

Hau-Yoon says that they had an inkling of how sticky the game might be during the playtesting phase. Among the nearly 200 playtesters, the median playtime was 30 hours. “For a normal game, that’s already really high,” he says. “And we had some playtesters who played for easily over 400 hours. We definitely didn’t have 400 hours of content.”

Instead, players would spontaneously come up with their own creation themes and challenges over Discord. “There’s an heirloom dress that I found really touching,” says Hau-Yoon, “where one person creates a dress and then exports the dress file and passes it on to the next player, who then continues making it. So it feels a little bit like this thing that was passed down generations, and you can trace through all of the changes that each person made. That was never built into the game, these are just players finding ways to enjoy it, finding ways to use the creative tools.”

Untapped audience

But perhaps the biggest reason behind Dressmaker’s fantastic rise is the fact that it serves a previously unaddressed audience – members of which might not necessarily identify as gamers. “I remember so clearly we had a conversation last year in December at a company party, where the founder of the studio was congratulating us,” recalls Becker. “He was like, ‘I’ve talked to so many people’s girlfriends who say that they don’t play games, but they want to play Dressmaker’. And I was like, ‘That’s our target audience’.”

Hau-Yoon says they don’t gather analytics on the players of Dressmaker, but the game’s social media following is indicative of the audience: 85% of followers are women. And Becker says that they definitely had women in mind when designing the game. “I feel like it’s such a massively underserved market in the gaming industry,” she says, echoing a point made by Piers Harding-Rolls of Ampere Analysis in a GamesIndustry.biz analysis last year. “And I feel like that’s such a limited view of the potential of what games could be and of the audiences that they could reach.

“I think the reason that a lot of women don’t play games is just because there aren’t games that they want to play, not because there’s some sort of inherent gender bias for or against video games. Before we made Dressmaker, we were watching a lot of videos about the history of girly games and what the girly landscape looked like in the ’90s and the 2000s, where there was much less of a gender divide when it came to being a gamer. You had a household PC and there were CD-ROMs and there were games for everyone.

“The reason that a lot of women don’t play games is just because there aren’t games that they want to play”

“There were so many Barbie games and dress-up games, and all of these things that appealed to more feminine interests. And then somewhere along the line, they just stopped making those for the most part. Every now and again there is one that will pop up, but it just feels like such a massively wasted opportunity.”

Hau-Yoon thinks that it’s a market opportunity more indie studios should think about grasping. “If it pays off, then it can pay off really, really big.”

A game for one person

Becker says the idea of creating a game about making dresses emerged during the COVID pandemic, when her partner Hau-Yoon was trying to find games about costume design or fashion that she might be interested in playing while they were both stuck at home. “And I would try these games, and initially I would be like, ‘Oh yeah, this seems like what I want’, but ultimately the mechanics felt very shallow or I felt like I wasn’t being respected as a player.”

Monster Hunter World became a favourite because of its dressing-up element – but Becker remembers that Hau-Yoon found it “ridiculous” that there were no games about meticulously creating clothes, the thing Becker was most interested in. “And then you just made it,” she recalls.

Hau-Yoon agrees that the genesis of Dressmaker wasn’t necessarily about targeting an underserved audience, and more about making a game that would specifically appeal to Becker. “Sabrina is super into clothing and the construction of clothing,” he says.

“When we first met, she was wearing a dress that she’d made herself, and then when we went on our first dates, we were watching movies that weren’t good movies, but had excellent costumes. Whenever we watched these at home, she’d be pointing out, ‘Oh, there was a costume change, and that’s important because that’s foreshadowing, and it’s telling you this thing about the story’. These are things that I had never really paid attention to before, but she really, really cared about these things.”

The creation of Dressmaker was “fundamentally a personal thing” he says, about creating something that Becker would want to play that otherwise “just didn’t seem to exist”. But making it fun was the hard part. Hau-Yoon acknowledges that creating a dress from scratch is a “many, many tiered process, and a lot of it is very tedious and repetitive”.

“How do we simplify this thing into something that works as a game and meets the expectations of someone who wants to be playing for entertainment, while also fairly accurately reflecting the real-world equivalent of that fantasy?”

That process took a lot of refinement, but Hau-Yoon says that overall, the game came together fairly easily. “In some ways, I think making a game that is based on some real-world activity is easier, because you don’t have to make anything up,” he says. “You can just look at the real thing for inspiration, and it’s more about filtering things.”

Future plans

Dressmaker might have a natural appeal to people who don’t normally play video games, but as a PC title, it’s currently tied to a platform that could be seen as non-intuitive – and expensive – for people who aren’t already embedded in the gaming world.

“I think we’ve always really thought about Dressmaker as being a game that is ideal for mobile and Switch,” says Hau-Yoon. “But to make a game for mobile and Switch generally is more expensive than making a game for Steam, both in terms of financial costs and the amount of effort. So even though we have had games that have been on console before, we’ve almost always made them for Steam first, just because it’s so quick to iterate on things.”

Now the Steam version is out, however, ports of Dressmaker are in progress. “We have a programmer who’s already been making some strides there, but we do really want the port to be really good,” says Hau-Yoon. “So we’re doing a bunch of it in-house. We want our interactions to feel like they really belong on the platform.” That process is going to take time to get right, he says, “so we don’t want to put any big pressure or deadlines on ourselves to do it.”

And in terms of what’s next… well, the audience has some ideas. “We’ve had a lot of requests for Hatmaker,” says Becker. “Someone who works here actually did three years of millinery school, so we have expertise for hat making. But we make no promises.”

In the meantime, they will be supporting Dressmaker with free updates. “There are some longer term ideas as well, but we’ll see how things go,” says Hau-Yoon. Becker adds that there’s an online competition mode in the works. “So yeah, there’s definitely a lot more to come.”

Perhaps there will be similar games to come from other developers, too, in the wake of Free Lives’ success. Dressmaker is a reminder that there’s a huge potential market out there consisting of people who don’t play video games simply because they don’t see any subject matter that appeals to them. What could games look like if we widened the net a little?