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Student venture guest post

By Kai Davis ’23

“Ethereal Metropolis” is a highly-ambitious, narrative-driven, tile-based strategy game, especially for a fledgling studio such as . Yet, we are filling a critical gap within the market where people haven’t been served meaningfully in the past seven years, leaving a market potential of $335 million in the genre of squad tactics tile-based strategy. If you don’t know what that is, no worries; what matters is that there exists a market opportunity and a kick of mine that has yet to be fulfilled in the past seven years.

But how do we know this?

Well, it wouldn’t be without the generous funding provided to us by Thought Into Action’s (TIA) Exploration grant. Back in January 2023, we applied for funding to purchase a subscription to the website known as Steamspy. Our subscription gave us unlimited access to Steam for purchase data, regional playing, daily concurrent players, player count, and so much more. We now have access to sheets containing thousands of data points that we can use to analyze to better inform us about the market we are entering, our competitors’ performance, sales numbers, and total revenue. Each sheet contains years upon years of data, chock-full of valuable information. Don’t believe us? Just take a look at some of the graphs that we were able to create to analyze our competition:

We used the information we collected directly in our Entrepreneur Showcase presentation and secured second place and a $3,000 cash prize for our venture! That money will certainly be placed in good use; wait a couple of months down the line to see how we use it. Or – if you are too eager – follow us on Twitter at  to see our development over the coming months.

While there are many steps ahead in our journey towards winter 2025 to develop Ethereal Metropolis, our next one is a Kickstarter campaign this fall! Take a look at one of our posters here:

Without TIA’s support to get us access to concrete numbers, I would not have received the rewards and knowledge about the market we are heading into. We wouldn’t have received $3,000 in additional funding, and we would be flying in the dark (we can’t fly in the dark, contrary to our namesake), which would have spelled quite a mess, to say the least.

From the bottom of our hearts as a team, we would like to thank TIA and its donors who made this happen. Thank you all for this opportunity and the wonderful opportunities such a fantastic program has offered me!

Far Owl Studios was a participating venture in the TIA Incubator from 2020-2023.