As I discussed in exuberant detail last weekend, Sektori is one of my favourite video games of 2025. The vast majority of people who play this Geometry Wars-inspired roguelike love it too, as its 97% positive Steam rating attests. But Steam’s rapidly revolving release tombola means that making a great game is no guarantee of commercial success. And as Sektori’s developer recently explained, the kaleidoscopic schmup is still a long way from making him any money.
Reacting to Sektori’s launch on Bluesky, former Housemarque developer Kimmo Lahtinen said reception to the twin-stick shooter had been “awesome” and “much more than I expected for such a niche thing”. Lahtinen fully appreciates the highly specific appeal of Geometry Wars-style games, likely why Housemarque itself pivoted to making third-person shooters like Returnal and the upcoming Saros.
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Lahtinen highlights an interesting point here, which is that the length of time a game takes to develop is increasingly at odds with the attention span of the Internet. While Sektori will technically be available to purchase forever, the chances of it retaining any long-term prominence in today’s market is low. This is likely why we’re seeing a growing number of smaller, cheaper, simpler projects with faster turnarounds like Peak and A Game About Digging a Hole. The more games you can put out, the better chance you have of one becoming a viral hit.
Lahtinen also shared some interesting data points about Sektori’s playerbase, namely that we’re all old fogies. “As I expected, I can see from the stats that the sub 25 year olds have zero time for this nonsense,” he says. “It’s the embarrassing ‘dad’s tribute band’—the game.
He also addresses one of the few bones of contention with Sektori, namely how it is reluctant to explain its system. This is a deliberate design choice by Lahtinten, but he’s nonetheless “a tiny bit surprised” that players have complained about it. “A lot of things are not explained on purpose, so that you can figure it out by yourself,” he says. “I kind of expected it was obvious before buying.”
Lahtinen is now working on a patch for Sektori to fix “a few tiny things”. I hope one of things is the difficulty spike that arises when you encounter your first boss on a run. I’m a huge fan of Sektori’s spectacular combat and largely on board with its level of challenge, but there are definitely a couple of areas where its difficulty curve could be smoothed out.
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