The video game industry has been a tumultuous place of late, with mass layoffs, game cancellations, and studio closures, not to mention ongoing fears about the role of artificial intelligence. These issues have affected developers big and small. One smaller developer that has endured and thrived is Supergiant, which just launched Hades 2 this week. Supergiant was formed in 2009 with seven people and has grown to 25 today.
However, it's important to note that neither of those metrics gives as complete a picture as some Internet discussions suggest they do; Civilization VII launched on other platforms and game stores like the PlayStation 5, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, and Epic Game Store, and those wouldn't be captured in Steam numbers-even though it intuitively seems likely that Steam would account for the significant majority of players for this particular franchise. Twitch viewership is also not necessarily representative of sales or the number of players.