A tiny Montreal studio turned a free demo into 500,000 wishlists — then launched
Probably Stolen, a dystopian shopkeeping simulator from small Montreal independent Questing Goose Studio, launched on Steam on 28 October 2026 at $19.99, with a 10% launch discount for two weeks. It is published by tinyBuild. The game asks players to run a shop on a gritty space station — trading, haggling, smuggling, and dodging security, criminals, and rogue AI-augmented shoppers — while rent keeps rising whether the week went well or not.
What makes the launch worth studying is what happened before it. According to Capsule Computers, the demo was one of Steam Next Fest’s most-played titles, with nearly 40,000 peak concurrent players — the highest of the event — and more than 660,000 unique players trying it. The demo holds a 98% Overwhelmingly Positive rating on Steam, and the game had gathered more than 500,000 wishlists before launch day.
Why it matters to independent teams: the demo was not a trailer with extra steps, it was the product, released early enough to become the marketing. A small studio with no ad budget turned a festival slot into a measurable funnel — hundreds of thousands of players, a wishlist count most indies would trade a launch budget for, and a review score that now does the selling on the store page. The lesson is about sequencing: Questing Goose shipped something playable at the moment attention was cheapest, then launched into an audience it had already earned. For small product teams, the takeaway is not “make a demo,” it is “make the demo the launch, and treat the festival as the first release date, not a rehearsal.”
Source: Capsule Computers, “tinyBuild smuggles Probably Stolen onto Steam” (29 October 2026).