Meccha Chameleon hits 15 million sales and teases a collaboration with a famous Japanese star

Meccha Chameleon, the indie paint-and-seek multiplayer game built by a two-person team in just two months, has crossed 15 million sales on Steam — less than a month after launching on June 10. Developer lemorion_1224 announced the milestone in a Steam community post and immediately dropped a tease: a collaboration with a famous Japanese star is coming next week.

The announcement was deliberately vague — the developer's original Japanese post uses the phrase "Japanese famous person," which fans read as a hint that it's a real public figure rather than a character from another game. Speculation on X has zeroed in on two main candidates: Hikakin, one of Japan's biggest YouTubers and a well-known beatboxer, and Harumichi Shibasaki, a watercolor painter and cozy YouTube creator whose aesthetic fits Meccha Chameleon's painting theme almost perfectly. Shibasaki has prior game crossover experience — he was part of Minecraft's 15th anniversary celebrations — which makes him a plausible pick.

Meccha Chameleon's premise is a twist on hide-and-seek: Hiders paint their small white character to blend into the environment while Seekers try to track them down before time runs out. The game blew up with streamers almost immediately after launch, and the developer has been pushing patches and updates at a rapid pace to keep up with the surge. Reaching 15 million sales with no marketing budget, in under a month, from a two-person studio is the kind of number that turns heads across the industry.

The collaboration reveal is set for next week, so the wait won't be long. In the meantime, the community is still theorizing — and apparently some players have taken the game's concept offline, recreating it in real life.