A Game About Digging A Hole is a game with an ironically self-explanatory name. It’s also one of the first viral indie success stories of 2025.
Content creators everywhere are playing it, generating millions of views and hundreds of thousands of sales in a matter of weeks since reaching Steam on February 7.
How A Game About Digging A Hole came to be
A Game About Digging A Hole’s Steam page lists its developer as Cyberwave, a two-person indie studio based out of Essen, Germany. However, the game was made by just one of the company’s staffers—artist Ben B.
While experimenting with the terraforming mechanics for Cyberwave’s upcoming survival game Solarpunk, Ben came up with a concept for a much simpler experience that’s entirely focused on digging. He decided to pursue this idea while on vacation and came up with a working prototype in less than a month, according to publisher Rokaplay.
Apart from reusing existing Solarpunk mechanics, the project was also fast-tracked thanks to Ben’s decision to use licensed assets instead of making his own. In doing so, he completely avoided the biggest bottleneck to modern game development: Making models, textures, animations—basically everything you see and hear.
The game’s success in numbers
A Game About Digging A Hole‘s Steam page went live in mid-December 2024. By the time it was released on February 7, over 140,000 Steam users had added it to their wishlists.
This early interest was largely driven by the game’s social media presence. Its first trailer went viral on TikTok, attracting over 5 million views before its release.
During the same period, its Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts pulled in another 14.5 million and 2.2 million views, respectively.
Two days after its release, A Game About Digging A Hole peaked at 7,477 concurrent Steam players. For comparison, Stardew Valley—one of the most successful indie titles of all time—had around 24,000 concurrent Steam players in its first 48 hours.
While the hole-digging game didn’t continue growing the way Stardew Valley did, it still sold more than 250,000 copies in its first week. According to an average of estimates from VG Insights, Gamalytic, and PlayTracker, its Steam sales are in the ballpark of 440,000 as of March 2025.
Unearthing the success factors
As it usually goes with indie hits, there’s no one single reason why A Game About Digging A Hole took off the way it did. However, some factors seem like more obvious contributors to its success than others.
Simple and addictive gameplay
On a fundamental level, Ben’s side-project is the essence of fun. It makes a single promise—letting you dig a hole—and then delivers on it with interest.
The gameplay loop is simple: Dig up a bit of dirt in your backyard, collect some rocks, minerals, and maybe even treasures in the process, then return to your garage to sell your haul. From there, you can buy resources and upgrades that let you do it all over again—except better.
There are four types of upgrades you can buy—improving your electric shovel, inventory capacity, battery size, and jetpack thrust.
Each upgrade tier significantly impacts gameplay, making every one of them worth getting. You can also pick up dynamite sticks and lamps to make digging and navigation easier.
Your backyard is just deep enough that you’re likely to max out all your equipment by the time you reach the bottom. This keeps the experience well-paced, maximizing the simple digging premise without overstaying its welcome or becoming repetitive.
A full run takes up to two hours, and there’s quite a bit of replay value if you want to hunt for achievements, most of which aren’t easy to get.
Effective marketing and mystery hook
Going viral on social media obviously didn’t hurt the game’s early sales. Although gaining online attention isn’t easy, A Game About Digging A Hole did so remarkably well.
Its first trailer is short and to-the-point, effectively showcases the game’s premise, and even hints at its central mystery: There’s something at the bottom of that hole you’re digging. The promotional videos that followed doubled down on this simple message.
The combination of accessible gameplay, meme potential, mystery hook, and short playthrough time made for fairly effective streamer bait—whether intentionally or not.
With plenty of content creators picking it up for a quick run, A Game About Digging A Hole peaked at 67,500 viewers and racked up over 1.7m hours in Twitch watch time in February alone. That’s more than 190 years worth of people watching someone dig a virtual hole.
Twitch streamers thus did quite a bit to promote the game, adding to its already impressive outreach on other video platforms.
Affordable pricing and accessible hardware requirements
The game’s price tag likely contributed to its success as well. At $4.99, this title falls into what most people would consider impulse-purchase territory.
At the end of the day, spending a few bucks on a unique experience is a tempting proposition for many gamers, as underlined by indie success stories like Vampire Survivors, Cookie Clicker, and Undertale.
A Game About Digging A Hole is also highly accessible in terms of system requirements, needing nothing more than 8GB of RAM and a GTX 770.
Originally released back when the PS3 and Xbox One were the most powerful consoles on the market. Based on Valve’s latest hardware survey, roughly 98% of all Steam users meet these requirements as of today—and the other 2% are close.
What’s next for AGADAH?
Some indie devs are calling A Game About Digging A Hole an inspiration, while others are already bemoaning the inevitable influx of copycats it’s going to produce. Sure enough, over two dozen clones appeared on the Play Store alone throughout February, and many more are likely on the way.
As for what’s next for Cyberwave’s hit, A Game About Digging A Hole is already confirmed to be coming to consoles. While its full list of target platforms hasn’t been announced yet, its modest PC requirements suggest the game could make its way to everything from the Switch to the latest two generations of PlayStation and Xbox consoles.
In the meantime, some players are already asking about the possibility of future updates, but it’s unclear if such a thing is in the cards. I’ve reached out to publisher Rokaplay for comment but haven’t heard back.
A Game About Digging A Hole’s success is a reminder that creating a hit game doesn’t always take a massive effort. Your game can be about digging a hole or clicking on a banana—it doesn’t really matter so long as it captures players’ imagination with simple fun and a compelling hook that keeps them coming back for more
