Donut County
GameBy Ben Esposito · Released Aug 28, 2018
Donut County is a story-based physics puzzle game where you play as an ever-growing hole in the ground. Meet cute characters, steal their trash, and throw them in a hole.
Connections
Each row is a game or company named alongside Donut County, each column a document, oldest first. A mark means that document names it. Select a row to see those documents.
About the game
- Released
- Aug 28, 2018
- Developer
- Ben Esposito
- Publisher
- Annapurna Interactive
- Genres
- Puzzle, Adventure, Indie
- Platforms
- PlayStation 4, Android, PC (Microsoft Windows), iOS, Mac, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch
- Links
- Wikipedia
Game data from IGDB.com
Documents about Donut County
🕳️ Suck It Up: Tactile's new hole game just ate Lily's Garden
Tactile Games is successfully scaling its latest title, Suck It Up, which has reached approximately $30,000 in daily in-app purchase revenue within three months of its soft launch.
- Tactile Games' new title, Suck It Up, has reached approximately $30,000 in daily in-app purchase revenue within three months of its soft launch.
- Suck It Up is positioned to potentially outperform the lifetime revenue of Tactile's previous flagship title, Lily's Garden, by focusing on long-term retention through collectible albums and a Zen Garden mode.
- Mobile developers are shifting away from Facebook toward more agile, automated advertising networks like AppLovin, Mintegral, and Unity due to declining performance and support on traditional platforms.
Steam Scanner: Steam hits mobile studios are watching
Monitoring emerging trends on Steam offers mobile developers a strategic 12 to 24-month lead time to identify and adapt gameplay mechanics that frequently dominate future mobile market charts.
- Monitoring Steam trends provides mobile developers with a 12 to 24-month strategic lead time to identify and adapt high-engagement gameplay mechanics for the mobile market.
- High-engagement loops currently ripe for mobile conversion include advanced simulation, specialized tower defense, and slot-based RPG systems.
- Market data indicates a growing player preference for high-stakes, non-PvP experiences, specifically within the PvE-focused extraction shooter genre.
Steam Wishlist Scanner: The games that matter by Jakub Remiar
Steam wishlists serve as a critical early-warning system for identifying emerging gaming trends and potential hits, often providing actionable insights for mobile market expansion.
- Steam wishlists function as a predictive market indicator, allowing developers to validate game mechanics, art styles, and themes before full-scale production or release.
- Co-op horror games are a high-growth segment driven by strong demand for social, shared player experiences.
- Chore simulators, characterized by repetitive, satisfying tasks and intuitive mechanics, are highly scalable and represent a significant opportunity for mobile market translation.
Enjoyment in the Anthropocene: The Extimacy of Ecological Catastrophe in Donut County
This paper, by Benjamin Nicoll of Queensland University of Technology, offers a psychoanalytic reading of the climate crisis through the lens of the 2018 videogame Donut County.
- The paper argues that effective environmental action requires acknowledging that humans may unconsciously derive enjoyment (jouissance, in Lacanian terms) from ecological deterioration, rather than relying on consciousness-raising, which it deems insufficient.
- The author contends this unconscious satisfaction should be redirected toward anti-capitalist, environmentally sustainable ends rather than repressed.
- Using Benjamin Nicoll's close reading of the 2018 game Donut County, the paper models subjectivity as a void or gap in material reality, positioned against new materialist, realist, and historicist approaches in ecocriticism.
The Playful Attitude and the Critical Attitude
Braxton Soderman's paper argues that scholars and commentators have grown excessively enthusiastic about the ludic and playful while dismissing the critical attitude as outdated, and that this enthusiasm warrants skepticism.
- Braxton Soderman argues that the playful and critical attitudes are conceptually distinct: critique depends on suspicion and doubt toward dominant norms, which playfulness does not inherently carry.
- The paper contends that playful perspectives increasingly constitute dominant reality rather than resisting it, linking this to Alexander Galloway's concept of ludic capitalism and playful forms of entrepreneurship.
- Soderman concludes that the critical attitude must be turned upon playfulness itself, since play can remake structures from a distance without removing their oppressive features.