Dressmaker, an indie game where you run a boutique and design dresses, is taking over Steam, becoming one of the platform’s Top 10 best-selling games mere days after its release.
If you’re on gaming Twitter, you’ve likely come across clips from a game where players are carefully stitching together fabric to make ornate gowns. That’s no coincidence; Dressmaker, the game in question, is having a moment right now, and Steam’s best sellers list proves it.
At the time of writing this article on September 24, Dressmaker has reached tenth place on Steam’s Top Sellers list. It’s also earned an Overwhelmingly Positive rating, with 96% of 2,177 user reviews being positive.
Dressmaker has beaten out massive titles like Diablo IV and even had the upper hand over Marvel Rivals for a moment. Its popularity is sparking a wave of interest in the game, as well as starting an interesting conversion on social media regarding smaller games that are made to suit a niche audience versus big-budget, AAA titles designed to appeal to as many players as possible.
One Twitter/X user described it best: “Take game marketed towards women and creatives / optimise it so it can run on most shitty laptops and PCs that have been sold in the last 10 years / fill it with whimsy and genuine respect for the craft it’s emulating / make a billion dollars.’
“Hey look, a niche game appealing directly to a target audience that loves it. Amazing,” another wrote, comparing the game to AAA titles that “look so generic I can’t tell them apart.”
“We need more of this! Make more games targeting specific audiences instead of bastardizing successful IPs to fit ‘everybody,’” another said.
Dressmaker was developed by Cozy Lives and published by Free Lives, an independent game studio based in Cape Town, South Africa that’s behind games like Genital Jousting and Terra Nil.
In Dressmaker, players own and operate their very own dress boutique, where they design and sew dresses for customers in a fictional town. It’s not just a dress-up game, though; you can also “sabotage” your clientele if you want to make the stakes a little higher.
This is the latest indie game to go viral on social media following Stray Dog: nobody cares, a Soulslike game where you play as a stray dog on a quest to rescue its master using an old, rusty sword it wields in its jaws.
Virginia Glaze
News Editor
Virginia (she/her) is IGN’s News Editor. With ten years of experience reporting on games and entertainment, she’s got a storied background in the fighting game community, influencer news, and viral online trends. Find her on Twitter at @TheeMissGlaze.