Placeholder Gameworks

Profile updated Jun 2026

Placeholder Gameworks is the developer behind Death and Taxes, with 2 titles on Steam and 8,856 total reviews. Their catalog includes CraftCraft: Fantasy Merchant Simulator. The dominant genre for Placeholder Gameworks is Casual.

Placeholder Gameworks is an indie game studio. indielist tracks 2 titles by Placeholder Gameworks, together holding 8,284 Steam reviews. Its most-reviewed game is Death and Taxes, which holds 7,758 Steam reviews (2020). Across its catalog the studio has worked with 1 publisher, including Placeholder Gameworks. indielist tracks releases from Placeholder Gameworks starting in 2020. That averages about 4,142 Steam reviews per title. This profile sits inside indielist's relationship graph of studios, publishers, and games, so players can find more titles from the same team, developers can compare portfolios and team sizes against peers, and investors can trace which publishers and genres the studio works across. Where Steam review data is available, indielist also publishes a transparent, white-box sales estimate for each of the studio's games, showing the full Boxleiter factor breakdown rather than a single black-box number, so the commercial picture behind Placeholder Gameworks can be audited rather than taken on trust.

Across its 2 tracked titles released between 2020 and 2025, Placeholder Gameworks has accumulated 8,284 Steam reviews, an average of about 4,100 per game, and its most-reviewed entries are Death and Taxes, CraftCraft: Fantasy Merchant Simulator. Review counts are the most reliable public proxy indielist has for an indie studio's reach, since raw sales are almost never disclosed, so this spread is a fair snapshot of how widely the studio's work has landed. Developers can read these figures as a benchmark: a studio of this output and review volume is a useful reference point when projecting where a comparable project might end up, and indielist shows the white-box sales estimate behind every one of those titles, so the comparison rests on visible Boxleiter math, factor by factor, rather than on a reputation or a single black-box number.

On the business side, Placeholder Gameworks has shipped with 1 publisher (Placeholder Gameworks), and indielist maps each of those relationships as an edge in its studio-to-publisher-to-game graph. That matters to two audiences in particular: an investor can trace which labels have backed this studio and how that roster has changed over time, while a developer can see which publishers are already comfortable signing work in the studio's genres before deciding where to send a pitch. This is the kind of sourcing intelligence that is slow and tedious to reconstruct from Steam store pages alone, because the storefront never exposes who introduced whom. Each linked publisher page in turn lists its full roster, deal tier, and current submission status, so the network around Placeholder Gameworks can be walked outward in either direction rather than read as a flat, disconnected list.