Thrifty Business news & patch notes

It’s now been (a bit more than) a month since we released Thrifty Business and some of you might have been wondering what’s been going on behind the scenes in the past few weeks, if we’re planning any updates and how the release went for us!

So, we sat down to record a little retrospective video to look at the 9 months we spent developing Thrifty Business, the overall wishlist numbers and sales and chat about what our plans for this game are in the future:

But to summarize we can say that, while we don’t have a road map or any specific dates for you yet, there will be more QoL updates as well as some more content coming! We’re currently juggling this game along with the recently announced Sticky Business DLC, so stay tuned for some more news soon!

And of course a big big big THANK YOU for all of the support over the last few months! Anyone who wishlisted, played the demo and gave feedback and of course purchased the game since release has helped our little studio and the creation of this game so much! We’re excited to continue this journey! 🧡

Talk to you soon!

Spellgarden Games 🔮 (Kathrin, Zoë, Kasimir, Sophie & Malin)

O M G!! First of all THANK YOU SO MUCH for a really really fun launch! It’s been absolutely amazing to see your reactions to our game, gush about different cute items together and see some first pictures of all your pretty shops!

And then we wanted to say if you have just a couple of minutes to spare, we’d super appreciate a review on Steam. We'd love to hear your thoughts so we can make the game even better!

And lastly, we just pushed a small update with a few bug fixes. Thank you all for helping us find those as well as giving some awesome feedback already!

The team will now re-calibrate a bit over the next week, and then we'll start working on some fun updates for the game and implement some of your feedback!

Patch Notes:

• Fixed capitalized letters not working on SteamDeck

• Fixed edge scrolling with controller not working

• Fixed recycling furniture would remove an additional furniture with it

• Fixed left trackpad would also move the camera sometimes

• Fixed button glyphs were misplaced when using the clean font and in asian languages

• Fixed selection in box shop UI

• Fixed a bug where the game could be stuck after picking up an item

• Fixed Marc now buying all saws, not only the handsaw.

• Fixed part of the UI not working on wide screens.

• Various text and category fixes

• Added visual progress for category levels

Spellgarden Games 🔮 (Kathrin, Zoë, Kasimir, Sophie & Malin)

Hi everybody!!! We’re so pleased to say that Thrifty Business is now open for, well, for business! We’re super excited/terrified to put it out into the world. Go little game!!

Thrifty Business is a cozy management sim where you run your very own thrift shop. Sort through boxes to find hidden treasures and arrange nostalgic displays of clothes, antiques, toys & more. Befriend the regulars, help with their requests and expand your store into a hub for the local community.

We’re a small indie team, and it’s safe to say we’ve poured our hearts into this one :,) Thanks so much to all our players, especially to those who’ve been around since the beginning. We hope you have fun!

Spellgarden Games 🔮

(Kathrin, Zoë, Kasimir, Sophie & Malin)

Only two weeks!! Two weeks until it’s time for us to hit that release button and you all get to open up your very own thrift shops! These past few days we’ve been knee deep in the bugfixing phase, and we’ll probably continue to spend some more time here - from customers without clothing, or entirely without a body, things are certain to not get boring…

But before The Day (May 18th) is here, we did want to hop on here with another update and video dev log! After we talked about some accessibility options and the character customization last time and already documented a lot of the initial development process, we wanted to focus on a specific aspect this time around! One that we think a lot of you might be very happy about (at least considering your demo feedback):

Let’s talk about item variety! We hope you enjoy watching this video and we’ll talk to you again VERY soon!! 🧡

Spellgarden Games 🔮 (Kathrin, Zoë, Kasimir, Sophie & Malin)

You might have already spotted it on the Wholesome Games socials yesterday: We have a release date for Thrifty Business - and it’s only about 6 weeks away!! 🥳

⭐ Thrifty Business releases May 18th, 2026! ⭐

We also made a new little trailer that hints at a few new things we’ve been implementing over the last few weeks! You can watch it here:

And speaking of! We wanted to share some of those updates with you, especially since a lot of them were highly requested in the Thrifty Business Demo feedback! 🫶

📄 Accessibility

Now first of all we’ve added a few settings you can toggle on or off, that will hopefully make playing a bit more pleasant now if you were struggling before!

🔠 Font

You can now actually choose to switch to a non-pixelated font entirely!

And then because we’ve gotten some feedback that the moving text can cause some dizziness or motion sickness, you can also fully toggle this off now! It works for both the pixelated & non-pixelated font of course!

🎨 Colors

We’ve gotten some really lovely feedback on the color palette we chose for Thrifty Business, since it’s such a nostalgic dopamine rush! But some of you also pointed out that it might cause eye strain or headaches for a few players, especially when playing for longer periods of time. So we’ve now built in a slider where you can dial down the saturation a bit. We hope this helps you enjoy the game for longer! 🫶

🪞 Character Customization

Now this one was probably the MOST requested feature by far!! And we’ve got good news, because yes, you’ll be able to customize your shopkeeper!

♻️ Recycle bin

And then one more thing you requested a lot was a recycle bin or some other way to get rid of any unwanted items or furniture. (Now, this may have been partially due to a little dog bed bug we had in the demo (oops), but we have now implemented this in the game! Even if just so you can curate your thrift shops bit more!

Just hold whatever item or furniture piece you want to get rid of and click on the little bin in the bottom right - and there you go! For furniture pieces you’ll even get 10% of the price back!

Apart from these changes we’ve been hard at work implementing the different stories and events and of course we’ve been making a bunch more items for you to discover in May!

We hope you’re all ready (and we hope we’ll be as well)! Talk to you soon!

Spellgarden Games 🔮 (Kathrin, Zoë, Kasimir, Sophie & Malin)

Our demo has been up for about a month now and OMG! Literally thousands of you tried out the game and gave us feedback about it, thank you so much! And while we intended for the demo playtime to only be around 30 minutes just to give you an idea of what this game will be, some of you have been playing this demo for 5, 10, 50 hours??? At this point we’re worried you’ll be tired of it by the time we get to release! 😅

But it also means whatever we’ve been doing seems to be working! So we’ve prepared another dev log style video in which we talk about all the changes we’ve been making to Thrifty Business in the last few months to take it from a simple idea to a truly fun game!

But of course, we’ll also give a few glimpses at what’s yet to come: event space changes, final shop size, more characters, stories & more! And rest assured, we’re steadily making our way through all of your feedback, and have already made lots of plans of how and when we can start incorporating some of those ideas!

For now, we hope you enjoy watching this video! 🧡 (We hear some of you might be interested in the release month as well, right? 👀)

Spellgarden Games 🔮 (Kathrin, Zoë, Kasimir, Sophie & Malin)

Are you ready for a little bit of cozy chaos excitement? We just updated the Thrifty Business Demo to include a Twitch integration that lets viewers visit your shop, drop trash and donate unwanted items!

The update also includes localization so you can now play the demo in 9 different languages and we’ve fixed a number of bugs and made smaller tweaks and improvements. You can find a full list of the patch notes at the end!

And now let’s talk Twitch Integration:

Streamers: How to connect!

All you need to do to get started is connect your Twitch account to the game:

Simply click on Settings → Twitch Settings → Authenticate with Twitch

The game will now redirect you to a browser window where you have to confirm the Authentication on Twitch and then you’ll be shown a confirmation message.

Go back to the game and you should now see your Twitch account connected! That’s it!! 😎 (The manual setup data below your username is hidden for your privacy!)

Streamers: Controlled Chaos!

Now, we know Twitch chat can be (and likes to be) a little chaotic, so we’ve added a bunch of different settings so you can control the chaos a little bit more. 🤝

You will find these in the End-Of-Day-Screen behind the Twitch icon in the top left corner (this will be hidden if you’re not connected) or you can also access this via the Twitch Settings!

Things you can control:

• How many boxes per day & whether first come, first served or random selection

• How many maximum chat visitors per day

• How much overall trash per day

  • Optional: Only one piece/chatter/day

  • Optional: Only allow trash when shop is open

And you will also be able to fully turn off each feature separately!

Viewers: How does it work?

Alright chat, now it’s your turn! We know you’re eager to start causing some chaos cozy vibes! 😈

All you have to do to be part of the fun is type commands into the chat on Twitch - no plugins/overlays or anything like that necessary!

!visit - Where you can throw a party in the shop!

Type “!visit” to have a customer with your name tag come into the shop, browse through and maybe buy something! (The name color you chose in the Twitch chat will be reflected in the game as well. If you don’t have a specific one selected, it defaults to purple.)

Note: These customer work like any other customer and cannot be further controlled by chat.

!trash - Where you can mess up the shop a little bit!

Type “!trash” into the chat and start littering, so the streamer has to clean it up! 😏

!box - Where you can “get rid of” some of your old (imaginary) stuff!

You can also donate some items that will appear in the box shop the next day (aka control what the streamers store might look like)!

Either use “!box \” to order a box with just one tag: For example “!box toy” for a box filled with different toys. Or you can use “!box \ \” to order a box with two different tags: For example “!box dress green” for a box filled with dresses and green items!

Btw, the streamer can pull up an overview of all the available tags in the game in the EOD-screen:

This is what the ordered boxes will look like in the game:

Of course we did a little testing ourselves and needless to say enjoyed the chaos a little bit too much… 😈 (To the dismay of Kathrin who needed to pick up approximately 2439574 pieces of trash - sorry not sorry Kathrin! 🫶)

And now: Have fun! (And don’t break the shops too much please 😂)

Full Patch Notes

• Added localization for French, German, Spanish, Portuguese (Brazil), Japanese, Korean, Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese

• Added Twitch integration

• Picking up trash now rewards you with Community Points

• Improved item inventory tutorial

• Added a bubble notification for new events

• Fixed aspect ratio scaling on 16:10 screens

We hope you (continue to) enjoy the demo and we can’t wait to see what everyone’s shop will look like! Talk to you soon!

Spellgarden Games 🔮 (Kathrin, Zoë, Kasimir, Sophie & Malin)

Thank you for all your amazing feedback and ideas you shared with us after we launched our demo last week! We’re already working on implementing some of the feedback and we also have some other cool things coming up, so keep your eyes peeled!

For today we have a small bug fix update for you to iron out some of the more urgent problems some of you encountered:

• Fixed a balancing issue with the pet items. You should find a NORMAL amount of dog beds in your boxes now. (We promise all of the puppies in town are fine, they just all outgrew their beds!)

• Fixed the stamp cards sometimes becoming non-interactable even if you had enough funds to unlock them

• Fixed a bug where trash could not be picked up

• Fixed customers sometimes walking around even if the game was paused

• Fixed a bug where furniture could be moved on top of customers, blocking them

• Fixed the button to unlock the second floor disappearing when reloading a game

• Fixed one of the furniture pieces not appearing in the shop after unlocking it

• Added zooming with Q and E

• Improved the tutorial to explain the item inventory better

• Added some missing item names

• Visual fixes

• Fixed a crash where the game would not launch correctly

• Fixed a bug where the game would not start on Steam Deck if an older Proton version was used

Spellgarden Games 🔮

(Kathrin, Zoë, Kasimir, Sophie & Malin)

Have you ever wanted to run your very own thrift store? Give nostalgic gems a second chance, meet your customers and decorate your shop exactly to your taste? Well, now might be your chance, because

💫 THE THRIFTY BUSINESS DEMO IS OUT NOW! 💫

So let’s chat about what to expect in this demo, what we’ve added since we last posted an update and what’s yet to come!

About the Demo

• 🛍️ What can I do in the demo?

  You’ll be able to play through the first few days of Thrifty Business. Learn the game’s mechanics, start unpacking some boxes full of nostalgic items and open up your thrift shop! Meet your customers and listen to their stories and requests and even host your first event in the store! And you can always rearrange your shop exactly the way you want!

• ⏰ How long is the demo?

  The demo includes the first customer story and event to unlock, which comes to around 30-45 minutes of playtime. You’ll still be able to continue playing and decorating your shop even after completing the first stories though, so really it’s up to you! 😊

• 🪲 What if I find bugs?

  Thrifty Business is still in development, so you very well may encounter bugs, typos or other inconsistencies! If you notice any, it would be incredibly helpful if you could report these bugs on our Discord server! You’ll find a designated bug reports channel in the Thrifty Business category with some helpful explanations of how best to report them!

• ⭐ Can I give feedback somewhere/share my ideas for the game?

  We appreciate any and all feedback to improve our game, so we’ve actually set up a little demo feedback form that you can find linked in the main menu in the demo. It will also open automatically once you exit out of the demo for the first time!

  And we’ve also set up a feedback channel in our Discord for any further ideas, suggestions or general feedback (or just some kind words, we love those too! 🤗)!

Thank you for all your help and feedback, it really helps in improving our games!

What’s new?

In December, we shared our video dev log with you, in which we went over the first few months of our development process and how we’ve made some of the early game decisions. So what’s changed since then, what is new in the demo?

📋 Pinboard & Events

When talking to customers they’ll sometimes mention a specific interest or their desire to meet like-minded people! Well, now you will actually be able to host events in your store to connect the community!

Customers will show up on the day and hang out in your store as well as the event space and you’ll unlock some exclusive event dialogue the first time you host an event. Throughout the day demand for certain item categories will be increased and boxes containing those items will be a bit cheaper! So make sure you’ve got your store all prepped and ready!

And so in the past weeks, we’ve been working a ton on the pinboard with which you can schedule these events in your calendar. And you’ll also be able to see some more information about your customers and current open item requests!

💫 Stamp Cards

Some of you might know we’re big fans of stickers (😏), so of course we found a way to sort of include them in this game as well - in the form of Stamp Cards!

Every day as you open your shop, you’ll now be able to earn community points for how well your shop is organized as well as how clean it is! And those community points you’ll then be able to use to complete Stamp Cards that unlock new furniture, decorations, wallpaper and flooring in your shop!

🕰️ Items, items, items!

And of course alongside new features, many small tweaks and further work on the customer stories, we added lots and lots of new items! More than 200 of which you can already discover in the demo!

We’re always looking for more ideas btw, so don’t hesitate to request some thrift shop finds you loved, toys you remember from your childhood or other things you think we should definitely have!

🔜 What’s next?

And now let’s also take a look into the future at all the things we still have planned for Thrifty Business, let’s just give you a little teaser list:

• More Stories & Events

• Photo Mode

• Interactive Items

• Character Customization

• Twitch Integration

• Localization

• Controller Support

And now before we let you go into the world of running your own virtual small business, we also wanted to share our demo trailer with you:

We sincerely hope you’ll enjoy this little slice of our newest game and cannot wait to hear from you! Thank you so much for all your support!

Spellgarden Games 🔮 (Kathrin, Zoë, Kasimir, Sophie & Malin)

Hi everyone!

Wow, what an exciting week we had! Thank you for your comments and thoughts on our announcement trailer all over social media. We are currently at 18.000 wishlists (!!!) and we are so, so happy with how the announcement went!

Before we head of into the holidays we prepared a dev log style video were we walk you through a full recap of what we did while we had to keep this project a little secret.

We hope you enjoy watching this! Happy holidays and see you next year! <3

Spellgarden Games 🔮 (Kathrin, Zoë, Kasimir, Sophie & Malin)

Imagine running your very own cozy & aesthetic thrift shop: You sort through boxes filled with pre-loved gems, decorate & organize your shop the way YOU want and meet your customers!

We’re thrilled to announce Thrifty Business! 🛍️

⭐ Wishlist now ⭐ and help us make this game a success! You can watch our very first trailer here:

When we first sat down to brainstorm our next project together and pitch our ideas, one general topic quickly stood out to us: sorting, tidying and organizing of any kind! ⭐

And if the name sounds somewhat familiar, that’s no coincidence! Thrifty Business joins our sticker shop simulator Sticky Business as another colorful business sim focusing on short story snippets that allow you to get to know your customers better! We’re excited for you to meet and befriend your regulars and discover everything on offer! 🛍️

🏷️ What Thrifty Business has in store for you!

• 📦 Unpack boxes full of pre-loved items!

• 🕰️ Arrange & re-arrange nostalgic displays!

• ✨ Organize and decorate your shop to attract new and returning customers!

• 💬 Learn about your customers’ stories and requests!

• 🎉 Host events to bring the community together!

📆 Coming 2026!

Yes, you read that right! Thrifty Business is practically right around the corner! And until that happens we’re looking forward to sharing some more BTS of our developing process over the last 3 months, as well as future plans we still have for it! Add Thrifty Business to your Wishlist to make sure you don’t miss anything! 💛

Spellgarden Games 🔮 (Kathrin, Zoë, Kasimir, Sophie & Malin)