Brazilian Indie Games and Hyperlocal Identity: Analyzing Culture, Design Choices, and Steam Reception in Gaucho and the Grasslands

This study examines Gaucho and the Grasslands, a farming simulator and adventure game developed in Porto Alegre, Brazil, to understand how hyperlocal cultural content from Rio Grande do Sul is negotiated in production and received on the global Steam platform. Its central argument is that hyperlocality generates strong affective resonance among domestic audiences while exposing the epistemic and market barriers that Global South studios face when their cultural repertoires are not treated as universally legible. The authors frame these tensions through the lens of coloniality and digital colonialism, arguing that Eurocentric platform norms and market preferences shape what counts as a "globally marketable" game.

The methodology combines semi-structured interviews with three core developers, conducted in November 2025, and an inductive thematic analysis of 377 Steam reviews collected in October 2025. Eighty-nine percent of these reviews were written by Brazilian players, a skew that the authors treat as central to interpreting the findings. Developers described a "fragile balance" in which cultural specificity carries value for local audiences but risks being seen as illegible internationally, leading them to consider diluting or adapting content, a negotiation they contrast with studios in the Global North that can rely on globally circulating cultural defaults.

Reception differed sharply by audience. Brazilian, and especially Southern Brazilian, players praised the narrative and cultural references as emotionally meaningful representation and were more tolerant of technical shortcomings. International players valued the setting primarily as novel worldbuilding, and their reviews placed greater emphasis on performance, mechanics, and polish. Structural constraints such as tight budgets, limited long-term funding, and thin industrial infrastructure were identified as reinforcing these asymmetries, with technical limitations disproportionately penalizing the game's international reception.

The authors conclude that the game contributes to an emerging ecosystem of Latin American games that treat local cultures as sources of innovation, and that it performs a decolonial gesture even though its developers do not frame it as such. The study is presented as ongoing research, with plans to broaden the interview sample and examine how narrative, design constraints, and player interpretation evolve over time.