"Good things can happen when you try to be good people about tricky situations." That's No More Robots founder Mike Rose summing up one of the stranger indie launch stories to come out of Steam in recent memory, posted to his Bluesky account after Piece by Piece ended up with roughly 3 times the sales he had originally projected.
How two totally different games ended up with the same name
No More Robots published developer Gamkat's cozy shop sim Piece by Piece on March 11. The game launched to what Rose described as "not amazing, not bad, just very middle of the road" sales. Fine, but not the kind of debut that gets anyone celebrating.
Then, two days later on March 13, developer Neon Polygons dropped its own completely unrelated game onto Steam. Also called Piece by Piece. A casual puzzle platformer, nothing like the cozy shop sim. Just the same name, arrived at independently, with no awareness of each other.
Steam sees over 20,000 games released per year, so name collisions aren't impossible. But two games with identical titles launching within 48 hours of each other? Rose called it "so weird and batshit," and that's a fair read.
The bundle that turned chaos into a sales spike
Here's the thing: rather than ignoring the situation or treating it as a problem, both studios leaned into it. No More Robots and Neon Polygons put together a discounted Steam bundle featuring both games, letting players grab the cozy shop sim and the puzzle platformer together at a reduced price.
The move got picked up by gaming press across the board. Coverage of the accidental naming coincidence spread quickly, and what started as a potential headache for both teams turned into a visibility boost neither had planned for.
Rose reported that 50% of buyers purchased the No More Robots Piece by Piece as part of the bundle alongside Neon Polygons' version. That's not a small number. Half of all sales came through a product that didn't exist before the naming coincidence created the opportunity for it.
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The Neon Polygons developer behind the puzzle platformer Piece by Piece confirmed they made back their full development investment within the first 24 hours of launch, according to GamesRadar+.What the numbers actually looked like
Rose was specific in his Bluesky post-mortem. The final sales tally came in at approximately 3 times what No More Robots had projected going in. The bundle drove a significant chunk of that, but Rose noted it wasn't the only factor. Wishlists for the game climbed sharply as the story spread, giving the team a new pool of potential buyers to convert down the line.
The key here is that the viral moment didn't just spike day-one numbers and disappear. It left a lasting tail in the form of wishlists, which on Steam are one of the better leading indicators of sustained sales momentum.
"It all absolutely popped off," Rose wrote, which is about as clean a summary of the situation as you're going to get.
What this actually means for indie devs watching from the sidelines
Rose was careful not to oversell the lesson. "It's hard to really have a takeaway from all of this, because we never planned for any of it to happen," he acknowledged. You can't engineer a naming collision with a friendly competitor and expect the press to cover it as a heartwarming story. That part was pure luck.
But the response to the situation wasn't luck. Both studios chose collaboration over conflict, moved fast to create the bundle, and let the story tell itself. The goodwill generated by that decision is what gave journalists something worth writing about.
For the hundreds of indie games that launch every week on Steam and disappear into the void, the real takeaway is less about naming strategy and more about how developers handle unexpected situations publicly. Transparency, humor, and a willingness to work with competitors rather than against them turned a potential PR mess into the best marketing either studio could have asked for. For more on what's landing on Steam right now, browse the latest gaming news to keep up with the indie releases worth watching. Make sure to check out more:
