Megabonk: The Anonymous Solo Developer Who Turned Down a Game Awards Nomination

Most developers would frame a Game Awards nomination and hang it on the wall. The creator of Megabonk looked at his and decided he did not deserve it, at least not in that category. It was a fittingly unusual moment for one of 2025's most unusual indie hits.

Megabonk is a 3D roguelike survival game made by a single, publicly anonymous developer known as vedinad. It launched on 18 September 2025 for Windows and Linux on Steam at $9.99, sold more than 1 million copies in two weeks and peaked at 117,336 concurrent players, according to SteamDB.

Vampire Survivors, now with jumping

Megabonk belongs to the genre that Vampire Survivors (read our feature) made famous, sometimes called "Survivors-likes" or "bullet heaven": you move, your character attacks automatically, and waves of enemies pour in. You collect experience gems from defeated foes, level up and pick from random upgrades that can snowball into ridiculous, screen-filling builds.

The difference is the third dimension. Instead of a flat field seen from above, Megabonk drops you into procedurally generated 3D maps with height, and gives you real movement tools: sliding, jumping and speed boosts. Escaping a swarm by sliding down a slope and leaping off a ledge feels very different from walking in circles on a 2D plane, and it gives the genre's familiar chaos a new physical thrill.

There is plenty to chase. The game includes 20 unlockable characters, more than 70 items and over 200 quests. Progress between runs is tied to a currency called Silver, which is deliberately scarce, so every unlock feels earned.

A million copies for one person

For a solo developer, the numbers were extraordinary. Passing a million sales in two weeks put Megabonk in the same conversation as other one-person phenomena such as Brotato (here) and Schedule I (here). Steam players rate it "Very Positive".

Critics were generally warm, often comparing it favourably with Vampire Survivors. Australian outlet GamesHub gave it 4 out of 5, and Lords of Gaming 8.5 out of 10. Not everyone was convinced: IGN criticised its humour and noted that the launch version had only two maps.

That mix is typical of the genre. Survivors-likes are often judged less on content volume than on how good the "one more run" feeling is, and on that measure, Megabonk delivered for a very large number of players.

The nomination he gave back

When the nominees were announced, Megabonk was on the list for Best Debut Indie Game at The Game Awards 2025. Then vedinad did something almost unheard of: he withdrew it.

His reasoning was simple. He had previously made games under other studio names, so in his view Megabonk was not truly a debut, and he did not think it qualified. As a result, it was not listed as a nominee during the show.

The game did not disappear from the awards entirely. It was later included in the 30-game first round of the Players' Voice award, the fan-voted category. It was also nominated for the "Sit Back and Relax" award at The Steam Awards 2025, which, for a game about surviving endless monster hordes, is a lovely piece of irony.

Why it matters

WGC's take: Megabonk is a reminder that genres do not get "finished". Vampire Survivors created a template, dozens of games copied it, and many observers assumed the space was full. Then a single developer added jumping and verticality, and a million people bought it in a fortnight.

The Game Awards episode matters too. In an industry where the word "indie" and the word "debut" are stretched to fit all sorts of projects, a developer voluntarily stepping back on principle was refreshing. It also shows how much the label "debut" can mean: years of smaller, unseen games often sit behind a so-called overnight success.

Megabonk is available on Steam for Windows and Linux. If you love the genre, read our stories on Vampire Survivors (here) and Ball x Pit, another 2025 hit that remixed an old formula (here).