This article was originally published on May 1, 2026 - read the full issue

By Alex Spencer

When we previously spoke to Jon Ingold, for one of the very first editions of Knowledge in March 2025, the conversation was hot on the heels of Expelled, then the latest release from Inkle, the studio he co-founded with Joseph Humfrey. In the year-and-change since that conversation, he's been a busy man.

In the intervening time, Inkle has published The Game Narrative Kaleidoscope, a collection of over 100 essays from videogame writers edited by Ingold, and launched an accompanying podcast. It will soon be followed by Ingold's fourth and final Heaven's Vault novel, continuing the story of its 2019 adventure game. Oh, and in this period the studio has also made and released an entire new game, which happens to be one of the 2026's finest to date.

TR-49, a deductive game about AI and literature wrapped up in a Bletchley Park-era computer interface, received a rare 9 in Edge on its release in January. It's one of just three 2026 games to achieve this score, alongside Resident Evil: Requiem and Marathon, productions with – to put it mildly – much more substantial resources behind them.

Finding success on Steam

TR-49 was created by a core team of three (Ingold, Humfrey and artist Anastasia Wyatt), with contractors helping out, over a span of nine months, and even that was a case of scope-creep, Ingold tells us. When he worked up a quick prototype in the week before Expelled's release, "it was originally intended as a one-month 'learn Godot' project," he says. "But we kept adding new bits of polish."

Whatever motivated Inkle to keep going with the project, it certainly seems to have been the right decision. "TR-49 came out and did better than anything we've ever done," Ingold says. (Specifically on Steam, that is – the game is also available on Switch and iOS, where it's performed "OK," he says. "Nothing sensational.")

While he declines to share exact numbers, Ingold explains that TR-49's sales on Steam have followed the usual pattern: an initial spike that ebbs away to a "background trickle," before spiking again when it's discounted – as it is right now, in fact, as part of Steam's InterfaceX26 sale of 'fake OS' games. The difference is simply one of scale. "That background trickle is about ten to 15 times higher than usual, and the launch spike lasted about five weeks instead of one."

This uptick is well deserved, of course, for such a great game. But, as Ingold himself says, "all our games are good!" So what made the difference here?

First, there is the matter of price. TR-49 costs $6.99 on Steam, a considerable step down from the $14.99 price tag for Expelled and its predecessor, Overboard. "Our thinking was that we wanted to hit the 'less than $7' box on Steam's front page," Ingold explains, "and we wanted a price we could use across platforms, so mobile is the same as Steam."

Ingold likes the "immediacy" of this price point, in a market where "people are always looking for a reason to not play a game." The idea, he says, was to make it feel like more effort to wishlist the game and wait for a discount than to just buy it then and there – a strategy that seems to have worked well for the likes of Peak.

Of course, when your game isn't selling in the kind of volumes as Landfall's hit, there are downsides to this approach. "It hasn't made us an enormous amount of money," Ingold admits. Does he have any regrets about the price in retrospect? "It was perhaps a little lower than we should have gone, but that's an entirely untested statement – I expect the price is part of the package people bought into."

Algorithm agony

More than anything, though, TR-49's success on Steam simply comes down to the whims of the algorithm that decides which games to surface on each user's version of the storefront. "We've never seen the algorithm treat us with respect before," Ingold says. "Normally, it kind of buries us after a couple of weeks."

Expelled was a particular victim of this, it seems. "A bug on [Steam's] side cancelled its launch-exposure window," he says. "That's the thing that 'tries' the game out on customers, and establishes its rank in the algorithm." As a result, the game "disappeared from Steam's front page about five seconds after launch." By the time Inkle had discovered the bug, a few weeks later, and was granted a second "visibility round" by Steam, it was too late. "Without the property of 'newness', the algorithm isn't interested," Ingold says. "You can't get back into New & Trending without some major community support from somewhere."

There may have been other factors at work too, he acknowledges: "It's perfectly possible Expelled was also too expensive, not something people wanted to play, released at the wrong time, came out when people were busy with Blue Prince, confusing, badly paced, too British… but who the hell knows? There's no way to unpick the aspects of a launch."

Lessons learned

Nevertheless, Inkle attempted to learn what it could from the situation, leading the studio to two conclusions. "Firstly, we have to make games we want to make, rather than chasing trends," Ingold explains, "because the results of a launch are so far outside of our control it's pointless to work on something we aren't delighted to have made. Secondly, we should aim to make more and risk less, so we can keep making things."

This is similar to the conclusion Inkle reached with Overboard, a game made in around three months that became, at the time, the studio's fastest-selling PC game. "TR-49 was definitely a re-run of the Overboard model," Ingold says. "Let's take this idea that we're excited about and get it made and out into the market as quickly as we can, while it still feels 'hot' – but without compromising it."

Back in 2022, for an Edge article examining the making of Overboard, we asked Ingold whether this development model would become the norm for Inkle. He demurred then, pointing out that it could easily become a trap for the studio. Four years later, he's similarly unwilling to commit.

This article was originally published on May 1, 2026 - read the full issue