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Episode Summary

Four days before launch, Mateo Covic had about 8,500 wishlists. For most solo devs, that is the number that decides whether launch day is a celebration or a quiet, gut-punch silence. The kind where you refresh your dashboard and watch nothing happen. Mateo knew that feeling was on the table. So he kept delaying, kept pushing, kept reaching out, until the game hit the popular upcoming tab on Steam and pulled in 3,000 more wishlists in the final stretch. He launched with 11,000. Today the game has passed 200,000 units sold and crossed the one million dollar revenue mark.

Mateo is a 23 year old solo developer from Germany and the founder of ZoroArts. He has been making games for years, including the pixel-art shark Metroidvania Maki’s Adventure and the in-progress roguelike Rogue Jungle. Then a paddleboat trip in Croatia with his brother, where the two of them spun in circles because they could not get in sync, became a shower thought, then a two hour prototype, then a ten second clip on Twitter that pulled almost 100,000 views. Four months of development later, Paddle Paddle Paddle was a co-op rage game that streamers across YouTube and Twitch could not stop playing.

In this episode, Mateo walks through the exact strategy that got major streamers to play his game without spending a cent on ads. Why he reaches out through Twitter DMs instead of emails, and how landing one big streamer started a wave that pulled in the rest. How he designed the game for watchability, leaning into the goofy moments that made clips go viral rather than obsessing over the core mechanic. How he kept the game growing for months after launch through free updates, region-specific skins, and watching streams every single day to catch bugs and stay close to his community. And how localization into 15 languages turned Asia into more than half his revenue, a market he never saw coming.

If you are building a game and the marketing side feels like a wall you keep talking to, this is the conversation that shows you a door instead.

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Meet Our Guest: Mateo Covic, ZoroArts

Mateo describes himself as an impulsive developer, and he means it as a strength. He posts development progress on Twitter constantly to see how people react, and that habit is exactly how Paddle Paddle Paddle was born. He built the first prototype in Unity with basic cubes and placeholder asset-store art in about two hours, posted a ten second clip, and watched it hit nearly 100,000 views when his normal posts earned around 100 likes. That single signal told him the idea had legs, so he kept building around one simple core: paddling a boat together through increasingly ridiculous levels.

He has been making games for roughly five years. His dream project, Maki’s Adventure, was a shark platformer that fused his love of Pokémon’s pixel art, Hollow Knight’s Metroidvania structure, and Wind Waker’s 3D hub world. He spent two years on it, then another full year of free updates after release, adding a level editor and a racing mode. That instinct to keep improving a game long after launch is now his playbook for Paddle Paddle Paddle too, with a second map, console and mobile ports, and a level editor all on the roadmap.

Since this conversation was recorded, Mateo has not slowed down. He released Cool Story Bro!, a chaotic 2 to 4 player party game where you write short stories from random words and can blow up your friends’ stories with a rocket launcher, in April 2026. And he just dropped the demo for CAAAHR!, a voice-controlled co-op racing game where one player literally screams to accelerate while the other steers through chaos, published by Assemble Entertainment.amers Discord, and making the case to developers that accessibility is good business as well as the right thing to do. Vinny is candid that he is not a coder or a game designer, but his time inside AbleGamers and the APX training has given him a sharp, real-world view of what features matter and why.

Together they make a simple argument that is easy to ignore and hard to forget once you have heard it: accessibility is not charity work bolted onto game design. It is game design.

Website: zoroarts.com

LinkedIn: Mateo Covic

Steam (Paddle Paddle Paddle): Store Page

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Key Takeaways

“If only one person plays the game, then it will be like a big wave. You only have to hit one big streamer and then the rest will follow.”

— Mato Covic, Zoroarts

• Design for watchability, not just mechanics. Mateo’s hard-won insight is that the pedal mechanic was never the thing that went viral. The goofiness was. A quiz level where players had to answer a math question, and one duo confidently got two plus two wrong, generated TikTok clips with millions of views. The screaming, the failing, the camaraderie of barely surviving a hard section, those were the moments creators wanted to show. If you want streamers to play your game, build in the moments that make their chat go crazy.
• Twitter DMs beat emails, because you get a signal. Mateo hates email because it feels like talking to a wall. When you DM someone on Twitter you can see when they have opened the message, so even a non-response tells you something. Email gives you nothing. He still sends 10 to 20 emails a week because they remain the most scalable outreach tool, but his energy goes to Twitter DMs, where he sends around 10 every single day, plus tags and giveaways with accounts like Jake Lucky and Dexerto who post game news to audiences that are 90 percent gamers.
• One big streamer starts the wave. The whole thing began when a German streamer named Fang Royale saw Mateo’s prototype tweet and later played the demo on stream. Within days, other big German streamers picked it up on their own, with no outreach from Mateo, probably because they saw a clip. You do not need to land everyone. You need to land one, and make the game good enough that the rest follow.
• Fit marketing into the gaps, do not block out time for it. Mateo spends 10 to 20 hours a week on marketing, but almost none of it is dedicated desk time at home. Home is for developing. He makes a Twitter post on the bus, on the way to buy groceries, walking to his shift at his grandparents’ restaurant. He does not spend an hour crafting an idea. If nothing comes to mind, he posts a progress update, because he works on the game every day so there is always something to show.
• The algorithm does not reward effort, so stop overthinking content. Three years ago Mateo spent ten hours editing a TikTok that got 20 views. A random clip of him holding his phone up to his PC asking for playtesters got 100,000. One YouTube Short of his game hit seven million views from a channel with eleven followers. The lesson is not to be lazy, it is to be consistent and stop pouring your soul into individual posts that the algorithm may ignore anyway.
• Watch every stream, it is your best feedback loop. Mateo keeps a Twitch tab open on the Paddle Paddle Paddle category and tries to watch every stream. It is not vanity. Most streamers are opening the game for the first time, so he catches bugs, sees exactly where players get stuck, and gathers organic footage for future content. He also comments on videos rather than sliding into crowded DMs, so the community sees the developer showed up.
• Launch on Friday, and let momentum do the talking. Mateo launched on a Friday on purpose. No new Steam games release over the weekend, so if your game is the best thing on Friday it can hold the front page through Saturday and Sunday. Paddle Paddle Paddle stayed on new and trending for about four and a half days. A comparable game, Backseat Drivers, launched with 150,000 wishlists, fifteen times what Mateo had, and sold a fraction of what he did. Wishlists are not destiny. Sustained post-launch momentum is.
• Free content builds loyalty, and loyalty builds markets. Over half of Mateo’s revenue came from Asia, a market he never expected. Working with publisher Assemble Entertainment, he localized the game into 15 languages including a fully translated Steam page. Then he made region-specific boat skins, a dragon boat, a duck, a Korean turtle warship, all for free. Players felt seen, and a developer who shows he cares earns a community that buys, shares, and sticks around.

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Show Notes & Mentioned Resources

About Mateo and ZoroArts

• Website: zoroarts.com
• LinkedIn: Mateo Covic
• Forbes profile: Mateo Covic on Forbes
• Vice interview: Mateo Covic on solo game development

Games by Mateo / ZoroArts

• Paddle Paddle Paddle (co-op rage game, the focus of this episode)
• Cool Story Bro! (party writing game, released April 2026)
• CAAAHR! Demo (voice-controlled co-op racing, demo out now)
• Maki’s Adventure (pixel-art shark Metroidvania)

Comparable Games Mentioned

• Chain Together, Carry the Glass (co-op rage games he benchmarked against)
• Backseat Drivers (the higher-wishlist game that sold less)

Key Frameworks from This Episode

Localize Then Localize Content: Translate the game and store page, then make region-specific free content to turn a market into a community.

The Watchability Test: Before adding a mechanic, ask whether it creates a moment a streamer’s chat would react to. The goofy beats the technical.

The One Streamer Wave: Focus outreach on landing one well-fit creator, then let organic discovery pull in the rest.

Gap-Time Marketing: Develop at home, market everywhere else. Use commutes and downtime for low-effort progress posts.

The Friday Launch Lever: Ship Friday so a strong day one holds the front page through a weekend with no new releases.

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