If you're worried about the game industry, please watch and share this video. There is hope! Context: Somewhere else in the world, two streamers that met online specifically because of their love for the first GRIME game had decided to run a 24-hour co-stream together and play @Play_GRIME alongside their community and many other streamer friends they rallied. During the night of their game's release, still in the high of their success but clearly after a ton of work on that final push, one of the developers from GRIME 2 showed up to the stream. What you're watching about 23 seconds into this video is what games are made for. Absolute wonder and joy. You'd think that the dev stayed for a few minutes, said thanks, and finally went to get some rest. Not at all, we're indies. We ball. The dev stayed for most of the 24hr stream, and also summoned the rest of the GRIME team that eventually joined through the night and hung out with their community until the end of the stream. The game's composer joined and shared background on how they came up with the tracks, one of them inspired by the sound of fingers tapping on a table. The game's enemy combat designer joined and was held responsible for the sheer evil attack patterns of some of their creations. On and on it went for an entire day. Just so that we're clear, GRIME 2 released to be 33rd in top sales worldwide on Steam, a substantial success for any indie game out there, especially from a small team of seven people. The stream from @aeru_aureus and @RonennHaustoria probably had around 100 concurrent viewers, mostly friends of the creators and loyal fans of GRIME. For a team just coming out of a release day having to worry about any possible fixes, patches, feedback and more to spend an entire night with such an objectively small amount of people is wild and must be celebrated. This wasn't a marketing decision or something calculated in a spreadsheet, this was a show of care and love from developers that have not forgotten who their people are and who games are made for. Any developers that can sit by the fire with others they don't even know and give so much of their time at their moment of highest exhaustion to celebrate and share in their excitement deserves immense praise. TL,DR; * Indie devs made game * Players love game, make 24-hour stream * Indie devs show up exhausted but excited to hang out with players * Chaos ensues and joy happens You know who did NOT show up to the stream? Spreadsheets, loot boxes, battle passes, or RMTs. Only a ton of wholesome humans, weird in all the right ways, playing a $24 indie title with more content than most of the $70+ "games" releasing with untested controller schemes so that we can collectively pay to QA and test them. I don't remember the last time I saw people starstruck about meeting the devs of a game. We should all aspire to make something so personal and special that people connect with it in this matter. Go buy @Play_GRIME and leave them a review, I'll link the game below! Indies and Gamers, together we are mighty!