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Lonely Mountains: Snow Riders is the follow-up to the successful downhill biking game [Lonely Mountains: Downhill](/game/lonely-mountains-downhill), which was developed by [Megagon Industries](/company/megagon-industries) from Berlin and released in 2019 with publisher [Thunderful](/company/thunderful-publishing). It had more than five million players. 

[Lonely Mountains: Snow Riders](/game/lonely-mountains-snow-riders) is a skiing game with a cross-platform multiplayer mode (co-op or competitive) for two to eight players. It was released on PC and Xbox on 21 January 2025, and is available via Xbox Game Pass. The game has been very well received by both critics and players. The team, based in Berlin, received €1,118,236 in federal funding for the "ski-quel", which was essential for the growth of the studio and for self-publishing as well. We spoke to [Daniel Helbig](/person/daniel-helbig), Co-CEO, Co-founder, Creative Director, about the huge success, the role of funding and a direct competitor that also focuses on skiing after a downhill biking game.

**GamesMarkt: How happy are you with the launch of Lonely Mountains: Snow Riders?**

**Megagon Industries**: "We are super happy with the launch of the game. The positive reception from players, press and content creators and the fact that over 500,000 riders have already hit the slopes since release has really been overwhelming. We're also very grateful to see that the existing Downhill community embraced the new game and that a lot of our longterm community members are back on the Lonely Mountains once more. More than anything we're thrilled that people really enjoy the new online multiplayer as that gave us quite a lot of headaches during the development. It's amazing to see all the hard work and time spent on it was actually worth it."

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**GamesMarkt: Why did you decide on skiing as a new theme after Lonely Mountains: Downhill, especially since Ragesquid is going in a similar direction with Descenders Next?**

**Megagon Industries**: "Even back in the early days, when we had just started working on Downhill, we talked about bringing the world of the Lonely Mountains and our design-approach to other sports as well. We always felt that there is a gap in the market for indie mid-price sports and racing games because historically that segment was mainly catered to by AAA games. 

Luckily, when we released Downhill we got tons of people reaching out to us asking for other sport versions of the game, which confirmed our initial observations. We experimented with another sport at first but skiing and snowboarding was on the top of the list of sports that people asked for. So in the end we just decided to listen to the community.   

That Ragesquid announced Descenders Next a week before we announced Snow Riders is definitely a very funny coincidence. We guess they probably received similar feedback from their community as we got from ours and we both came to the same conclusions. But as Descenders and Lonely Mountains have very different gameplay approaches they always nicely coexisted beside each other, and we believe the same will be true for Snow Riders and Descenders Next. We definitely wish only the best to Ragesquid and No More Robots for their upcoming release!"

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**GamesMarkt: Lonely Mountains: Downhill was originally published by Thunderful Publishing. This time you are publishing it yourself. How did that come about?**

**Megagon Industries**: "There were several things at play that motivated us to self-publish Snow Riders this time. 

First, the success of Lonely Mountains: Downhill gave us a little bit more financial wiggle room and time to think about how we wanted to develop and distribute our next game, without the pressure to just get the next best publishing contract as fast as possible before money runs out.

Secondly, we knew that the publishing contract for Lonely Mountains: Downhill would run out during the development of Snow Riders. We historically always had a say in the marketing of the game, did all the marketing assets and trailers ourselves and were responsible for all community channels. But at that point we were also doing all the console and DLC work for Downhill in-house which was previously done by an external porting studio. So it was a very good opportunity to take over the publishing of Downhill as well. But although we publish both games ourselves nowadays, we are still very glad and grateful that we first published Downhill together with Thunderful as we definitely needed the time to learn the ropes. 

But even with the financial backing from Downhill, we would have never been able to self-fund and publish the game without the grant from the German government (Computerspieleförderung des Bundes). That was definitely the final puzzle piece that we needed. But with all these pieces in place (and a few more, like working together with [Future Friends](/company/future-friends-games) on the PR side) and our Downhill experience, self-publishing felt like a good next step for the game and the company." 

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**GamesMarkt: Lonely Mountains: Snow Riders is included in Xbox Game Pass at launch. How did you come to this decision? Did you have such a good experience with Lonely Mountains: Downhill that you'll want to do it again?**

**Megagon Industries**: "We believe Game Pass was a huge part of the success of Downhill. One of the biggest problems for indie developers (or actually any game developer no matter the size) was and still is to get eyes on their game. Being in Game Pass helps with that tremendously as it can potentially get your game in front of millions of players. It also helps a lot with press and content creators as it makes your game stand out among the thousands of other games released each month. 

Snow Riders is also an online multiplayer game. And one of the lessons we learned the hard way during the Steam Next Fest is that you need tons of players to make sure that there are enough people playing the game at any given moment of the day. We realized pretty quickly that even in a best-case scenario we would never ever sell enough units on Steam to ensure that. And if a multiplayer game doesn't have enough players, you get bad reviews, which leads to even less players and your game will spiral into death pretty quickly. 

This is where Game Pass comes to the rescue as we support cross-platform multiplayer. So all the Game Pass players actually help us to provide a good multiplayer experience on Steam as well. 

Of course there is the question whether you cannibalize your actual sales if you are available in a subscription service. Although we don't have any numbers that we can compare to our sales, we believe the additional attention, word-of-mouth and community that comes with a service like Game Pass far outweighs that risk, at least for our type of games."

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**GamesMarkt: Lonely Mountains: Downhill had over five million players. That's an impressive number. Can you talk about the distribution of players across platforms and the influence of Xbox Game Pass? Because Steam was obviously not the strongest platform.**

**Megagon Industries**: "In terms of pure sales Nintendo Switch is actually the most successful platform for Lonely Mountains: Downhill, closely followed by Steam. Due to the game being in Game Pass for so many years, Xbox or Windows PC definitely has the highest player base followed by Playstation as the game is also available on PS+. Of course the install base on these subscription services far outnumber the amount of sold units. Nonetheless, we are very happy to be a part of them as they introduce many new players to your game even years after release and help a lot to keep the community alive." 


**GamesMarkt: How has Megagon Industries changed since Lonely Mountains: Downhill?**

**Megagon Industries**: "We would say nearly everything has changed over the last 11,5 years. Downhill was developed in a coworking space by three people, Jan, Daniel and Noah.

Nowadays Megagon has 14 full-time employees. Although we are part of the Saftladen and have an office there, Snow Riders was completely developed remotely and while most of the team is in Berlin, we also have people working in Hamburg, Kassel and even in Sweden. 

Development-wise a lot has changed as well. Backend- and console programming is now done fully in-house, the level design, art and programming team has grown quite substantially, we have a dedicated game director for Snow Riders and even an internal QA manager. And of course we also had to adjust to all the responsibilities that come with self-publishing our games. Without a publisher we can now work directly with the localization and external QA teams (shoutout to the great people from Altagram) and for press and content creator outreach we work closely together with the amazing folks from Future Friends.  

The only thing that probably didn’t change is that Lukas from Syndrone is still taking care of the unique sound design of the Lonely Mountains and we very much hope to continue that collaboration in the future."

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**GamesMarkt: How would you rate Berlin as a location for the development of games in general?**

**Megagon Industries**: "We believe the Saftladen but also Berlin in general is probably one of the best places to be as an indie developer right now. The city has a very, very active community with different regular events (Talk & Play, Games Circle, Game Creators Hangout, Berlin Mini Game Jam, IGDA chapter Berlin and more), big spotlight events like A Maze or Games Ground, a strong business network with the media/games.net, regional funding by the [Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg](/company/medienboard-berlin-brandenburg) and multiple game dev universities and private schools. There are also tons of established and successful developers of all sizes and also fresh and new developers who keep you on your toes. But no matter whether veterans or youngstars, in our experience there is always a lot of trust and feeling of companionship between Berlin developers. Everyone is always trying to help each other in every way they can."

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Megagon Industries: With Funding to Self-Publishing and Over 500,000 Players on the Slopes