Nearly a week after launch, a cozy game about sewing dresses is still pulling crowds on Steam that plenty of big-budget releases would envy. Dressmaker, from developer Cozy Lives and publisher Free Lives, the studio behind Broforce and Terra Nil, came out on September 21, and its player count has kept climbing since.
When RCG checked Steam’s own player-count data around 5:10 PM CT Saturday, 25,980 people were playing Dressmaker at once. SteamCharts, which logs the count hourly, recorded 27,372 concurrent players at about 3 PM CT the same day. That’s the highest figure it has logged since it started tracking the game on September 23, when it counted around 10,800.
Reviews are just as strong. At the same check, 97% of the game’s 3,546 Steam user reviews were positive, earning it an Overwhelmingly Positive rating.
What is Dressmaker?
It’s exactly what the name says. You run a small dress shop in a town full of customers who want custom outfits. Every step of the craft is part of the game: picking fabric, laying out and cutting pattern pieces, feeding panels through the sewing machine, then finishing with buttons, bows, lace trim and appliqué. How you lay a pattern on the fabric, along the grain or on the bias, changes how the finished dress looks.
Townsfolk bring commissions tied to events and their own tastes. You can make something that delights them, or, as the Steam page cheerfully allows, sabotage them. You can also hang your own designs in the shop window and sell them off the rack. Fabrics include cotton, linen, wool, silk and velvet. And yes, per the store page, you can pet the kitty.
Dressmaker is on Steam for Windows and Mac. It normally costs $14.99 and was on a 10% launch discount at $13.49 when RCG checked.
Outselling the big names
The game broke onto Steam’s global top sellers chart almost immediately. GamesRadar+ spotted it in ninth place a day after launch, ahead of Control Resonant and Diablo 4. By September 25, Polygon had it at No. 10, ahead of Silent Hill: Townfall and The Blood of Dawnwalker. On Saturday evening it was still in Steam’s U.S. top sellers, ahead of EA Sports FC 27 and Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve.
Polygon reports that Dressmaker started out as a three-week project. It built a following among cozy-game fans well before launch, with an appearance in the 2026 Wholesome Games Direct along the way.
“It turns out my optimism was right”
The success has clearly landed with the team. In a post on the game’s Steam page the day after launch, creator Jonathan of Cozy Lives wrote about the risk of loving your own game too much as an indie developer, and the relief of seeing players call Dressmaker their dream game.
“It turns out my optimism was right and I’m not (that) crazy!!!” he wrote. “And we have fully recouped our costs, which allows us to continue working on this project that I love.”
He writes that the game grew out of Sabrina teaching him how much clothes reveal about culture, technology, social status and craft, and that he wanted to capture the joy she found in it. The goal, he wrote, “wasn’t to make as much money as possible, but to make the most beautiful dresses.” That’s turned out to be a pretty good business plan.
Cozy Lives has already shipped two patches with fixes and quality-of-life tweaks, including a way to change thread color in the sewing scene. The team says more bug fixes and UX improvements are on the way.
