A Steam game made by 4 people did what Facebook’s billions couldn’t

Facebook’s parent company, Meta, has burned through an unfathomable amount of money in the last few years — a billion every month — to try and make a digital universe. Beyond social playgrounds, one key aspect of Meta’s VR pitch was an immersive online office space where, regardless of location, floating torsos could come together and increase shareholder value. These ideas were practically dead on arrival. But while Meta appears to be abandoning the dream, one tiny team on Steam is currently blowing up with a very similar idea.

Right now, On-Together: Virtual Coworking is charting its way through Steam’s Popular New Releases tab. The difference? No expensive VR is needed. Rather than spending thousands of dollars to edit an Excel sheet, you only need $9.99 to do the same on Steam. And, critically, On-Together doesn’t feel like an anodyne platform where the only thing blossoming is advertising conversion rates. On-Together is almost like an anime come to life: think Animal Crossing meets Studio Ghibli, maybe with a splash of Webfishing. Oh, and it’s got games.

Users can make endearingly cute avatars who can hang out in third spaces like libraries and parks, or more whimsical locales like forests and lily pads. These areas also host other real people, and you can interact with them to whatever extent you’d like. Perhaps you’re on a tight deadline, and you relegate all the cel-shaded workers to a corner of your screen where they can act as a brief reprieve from the task at hand. On-Together has a number of built-in tools, including timers, to-do lists, and desktop recreations that allow you to pull up files easily, should you want to get cracking with work.

What really makes On-Together special, though, is everything that happens beyond labor. Its customization options are surprisingly extensive, allowing you to set everything from idle animations to pets like cats and capybaras. If you take a breather from work, you can participate in fun mini-games, like races, fishing, basketball, and even music creation. Your break room can be anything from a beach-side escapade to an elegant lighthouse. You can chat with total strangers, or make servers with your own pals. While there is no shortage of potential distractions, On-Together incentivizes users to focus via tickets that unlock even cooler clothes and accessories.

Since its release on January 19, On-Together has reached a high of around 2,000 concurrent users — but GigaPuff, its creators, say that the release and its previous demo have serviced around 60,000 people. Perhaps these don’t sound like massive numbers, compared to the millions sold by blockbusters. But to put this into perspective, one 2023 investigation found that Meta’s attempt at the same thing only had around 900 total users over the course of a week. Presumably, that number only got smaller as time went on: Meta plans to shutter its services altogether in February. It’s also a higher concurrent peak than live-service games with the backing of small armies and hefty budgets, like Concord and Anthem. It’s certainly more than any of its developers ever expected.

If you ask Ilgın S., one of the developers for the coworking Steam game, one of the major reasons their attempt has succeeded where others haven’t is that there’s none of the pressure that comes with an officially sanctioned workplace. The people around you don’t have to be your actual coworkers. If you want, you don’t have to be productive at all. You can approach On-Together more like a social occasion, with virtual hangouts full of new people to meet. Your work isn’t being tracked, nor are you in danger of getting in trouble for goofing off while you’re messing around.

Ilgın tells Polygon that the idea sprouted back at the start of 2025, when GigaPuff was already working remotely.

“We genuinely love that early-2000s chatroom and online game culture,” Ilgın says. “As we got older and more involved in work life, I guess we felt like we needed a bit of that space again.”

Ilgın says that the dev team naturally gravitated toward things that made them feel less alone while working, like having someone on a Discord call or allowing a life sim game to run in the background. But unlike a CEO who is trying to convince you that you’ll send better emails by spending hours commuting and eating your daily slop bowl, Ilgın bristles at the idea of On-Together as a business tool.

“It’s about making the experience of working feel a little less heavy, and a little more human,” Ilgın says. “Work itself can be a form of suffering. We’re not glorifying it. We’re just trying to get through it together.”

Based on its Steam reviews, On-Together is delivering on that promise. The top review on the storefront hails from a student who says they were struggling through college until GigaPuff’s creation and its warm community helped them lock in. Many reviews point out potential areas of improvement, but there’s still enough enthusiasm there for On-Together to have an Overwhelmingly Positive rating on Valve’s platform.

As far as GigaPuff is concerned, Facebook’s version of the metaverse was mostly hype. Mostly, the team seems concerned with scaling an experience it never imagined exploding up this much. Ilgın says that hearing stories from people who say On-Together allowed them to pass exams, get through tough workdays, and even form new D&D groups has motivated the team at GigaPuff to keep improving the experience. But the goal isn’t better work optimization. Instead, GigaPuff wants to expand On-Together so that it keeps feeling like a living playground for its users.

“I dont know what they put in this game but in the 3 hours i’ve had it open i cleaned my 2 month depression room, washed all my clothes and dishes, vacuumed everything, and got a ton of writing and voice training done,” one top Steam review reads. “I love this so much.”