Dressmaker Dev: Women Love Games, But There Aren't Enough For Them

Ever wonder why so many women don't play video games? According to one dev, it's not because they don't like them—it's because there aren't enough games made for them. Dressmaker, a dressmaking sim from developer Cozy Lives, has become an unexpected smash hit, and lead dev Sabrina Becker thinks its success is partly because it targets women—a group she calls "such an underserved market."

The numbers back up the hype. A month after release, Dressmaker boasts 17,530 user reviews with a 98% positive rating, and it's still pulling in over 15,000 average concurrent players, keeping it in Steam's top 100 even as a small single-player game. Not bad for a cozy little dressmaking sim, right?

Becker, who leads Cozy Lives with her husband Jonathan Hau-Yoon, told me they were "definitely targeting women from the get-go." She added, "The fact that we have gotten so many men interested as well is just a great bonus." But she's clear about the bigger picture: "Women are such an underserved market in video games, even though women love video games. I think people sort of assume that women don't play games because they don't like them, but women just don't play games because there aren't games that are geared towards what they're interested in."

She points to platforms like Roblox, where a surprisingly large population of women—not just young girls—engage with dress-up games "even though they don't have the best experience, because they are really craving that type of gameplay and there's nowhere else that offers it." That craving inspired Dressmaker. "If that's what they want, we can give that to them," Becker says.

And the game's reviews show just how much it means to players. One Steam reviewer, a nursing home caretaker, wrote: "You have given old ladies with arthritis the gift of dressmaking again. You have inspired me to get out my sewing machine again." Another shared how the game connected them with their mother: "She's never really shown interest in my games beyond a curiosity of what I was doing, but with Dressmaker? She wants to play it!"

For Becker, the game is deeply personal. She worked in fashion before chronic illness Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (EDS) forced her to change careers. "I was pursuing costume design," she explains. "I've been really passionate about sewing and clothing since I was a kid. My mom taught me how to sew, and she was a designer." When EDS made her too ill to continue, she shelved that passion—until her health improved just as Hau-Yoon wanted to make Dressmaker.

The launch has been overwhelming for the duo. Hau-Yoon says he was prepared to ship the game and patch it afterward, but "I wasn't really prepared for the very large flood of players and media attention." Becker adds, "I'm just so happy that so many people love the game."

And Dressmaker isn't even finished. Cozy Lives expected a bigger audience on mobile and Nintendo Switch, and plans to port the game to other platforms eventually. They started on Steam because iterating and updating on PC is easier with less platform certification. With such a massive audience, there are definitely plans for major updates—including a teaser for an online feature that lets players vote on their favorite dress designs. "We love this game so much, and it was always our hope that we would be able to continue working on it and build on it," Becker says. Hau-Yoon adds that the launched version was "the best we can do when we are time and budget-constrained," and now they have time for the backlog of ideas they couldn't fit in.

So, what do you think? Will you be picking up Dressmaker to see what all the fuss is about?