The $17.5 Million Indie Game That Died In Silence

Taking care of your health just got easier – start here with our sponsor Zocdoc: https://Zocdoc.com/Akshon Starlight Re:Volver was an indie game created by Pahdo Labs. It had a budget of $17.5M, more than 100,000 wishlists on Steam, and was one of the most played demos at Steam NextFest 2025. It had the potential to be one of the biggest anime Roguelites released in 2026, but when it launched, not even 1,000 people bought the game. What happened? After discovering that Pahdo Labs received millions of dollars from investors like Andreessen Horowitz, BoxGroup, Pear, Jump LLC., Zynga founder Mark Pincus, Eventbrite founder Kevin Hartz, and King.com founder Riccardo Zacconi, people started calling the game a potential crypto and NFT scam. Despite Pahdo Labs’ CEO Daniel Zou assuring players that the game was legit, things were downhill from there. Just 3 months after peaking at under 500 concurrent players on Steam, Pahdo Labs shut down for good. What could have become the “Roblox of Anime games”, instead turned into yet another indie game disaster. Become a Member to support us:    / @akshonmedia   Follow us to stay up to date with our releases! Website: https://www.akshonmedia.com/ Facebook:   / akshonmedia   Instagram:   / akshonesports   Twitter:   / akshonesports