Picture a developer squeezing in game dev sessions after long shifts at a day job, building something he has wanted to make his entire adult life. That is exactly the story behind Erenshor, the single-player RPG from one-man studio Burgee Media, and it just had a first year on Steam that most indie developers would consider a career highlight.
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From nights-and-weekends project to life-changing launch
Erenshor is a deliberately unusual concept: a solo RPG designed to feel like a classic MMO, complete with simulated players, guilds, and group content, all without a single real person on the other end. Brian "Burgee" had been making games casually for years before this one, releasing a 2D shooter, a roguelite, and a math puzzle game across a span of years. None of them moved the needle. Each was cheap or free, and each landed with minimal attention, which is about as standard an experience as you can have as a new developer on Steam.
Erenshor was different from the start. After years of working on it in stolen hours after his day job, Burgee launched the game into Steam Early Access and watched something he had never experienced before: it worked. Really worked.
One year in, the numbers tell the story clearly. Erenshor has crossed 80,000 copies sold while still in Early Access, and its 1,941 Steam user reviews sit at 94% positive. For a solo developer with no marketing budget and no studio behind him, that is a result that changes the math on everything.
What 80,000 copies actually means for one person
Here's the thing: raw sales numbers only tell part of the story. What they translated to for Burgee was something more personal. He left his day job. He gets more time with his kids during summer break. He can flex his schedule around family events. The side project that was generating some early buzz became, almost overnight, his entire professional life.
"Working full time on games was this seemingly unattainable dream I had for my entire adult life, and now here I am doing it," Burgee said. "I can't imagine anything else at this point."
That shift came with its own pressures. Success on Steam can feel fragile, especially when you have watched years of quiet launches before it. Burgee admits the first year was tough to mentally step away from, describing an irrational fear that constant attention was the only thing keeping the momentum alive. His home office being ten feet from the couch did not help the work-life boundary situation.
"I have this sort of irrational fear that it's all going to just go away if I don't give it my constant attention," he said. “It's been a learning process though and I'm getting better at carving out downtime for myself.”
The community that built a better game
What most players miss when they look at a successful Early Access launch is how much the community shapes the final product. Erenshor's player base has been unusually active: filing bug reports, building mods, filling out a wiki, and volunteering to test new content before it goes live. That kind of engagement is not something a solo developer can manufacture.
Burgee ran his own research before launch, studying what developers typically experience from Early Access releases and setting predictions accordingly. Every metric he tracked exceeded those predictions by a wide margin, from day-one sales versus wishlists to review score to press coverage.
The practical effect of that community involvement is a game that is heading toward its 1.0 release in better shape than it would have been if Burgee had simply developed it in isolation until he considered it finished. Early access let the community function as a collaborative design partner, surfacing priorities and problems that a single developer working alone would have missed or deprioritized.
"The game is heading to a way better place for 1.0 than it would have been had I worked on it in isolation," he said. "Early access let me take this solo project and put it in the hands of the community for their guidance."
The key here is that Erenshor's success is not just a feel-good story about a developer catching a lucky break. It reflects a real appetite for a specific type of game, the classic MMO experience, that large studios have largely abandoned in favor of live-service models. Burgee found a gap and filled it with something personal, and players responded to exactly that.
With Erenshor's 1.0 still on the horizon for 2027, there is plenty of development still to come. If you are looking for something to play while the game continues to evolve, our gaming guides cover a range of RPGs worth your time, including deep-dives into build systems like the Shape of Dreams best meta builds guide and the Mythic Protocol starter guide for players jumping into something new.
