When a new multiplayer shooter launches on Steam, one of two things usually happens: it either grabs the attention of a dedicated player base, or it fizzles out in a wasteland of empty servers. Brutal as it is, this is how the volatile digital PC gaming market works. You have a chance to start a game and make your first impression. or do you
There’s another maneuver that some developers have been trying lately that has worked pretty well so far: pretend your old game is new and try not to mention that it failed before.
That do-over phenomenon played out this week with Hypercharge: Unboxed, a multiplayer FPS about warlike action figures that you may have seen a clip of on Twitter.
Dear Xbox fans, positive vibes. let’s make this tweet viral! We are five adults developing our childhood dream game where you play as “action figures”✅RT and more RT! If you want to become an action figure on Xbox sign up here : https://t.co/siom0AIxZO pic.twitter.com/v3IuIjsf5IJuly 3, 2022
The official Twitter account for Hypercharge has spent the last few weeks sharing daily clips of the game, usually with a short pitch like “We’re five adults making our childhood dream game” or “Imagine a game based on ours Childhood based action figures. ” They often ask for help to make their tweets go viral or tag key influencers. Just looking at the tweets, you would be forgiven if you didn’t realize that Hypercharge came out two years ago and on two different platforms. Hypercharge was released on Steam and Switch in 2020 and was in Early Access for years before that, but despite generally positive reviews and appearing on Steam’s top sellers list, it didn’t last long with an audience.
However, for Twitter, Hypercharge is a new viral hit. Those daily clips of fake Goku and GI Joe characters competing in charming toy store arenas have paid off. One particularly popular tweet racked up 14 million video views in just three days.
“These 5 guys are trying to make an indie game,” said the esports influencer Jake lucky (opens in new tab) in a popular tweet, suggesting that Hypercharge hasn’t been made yet. Tom Warren from The Verge also briefly described (opens in new tab) Hypercharge as “an upcoming Xbox indie game,” before later correcting that statement in a less popular reply. IGN called attention (opens in new tab) to the game without saying it was new, but by this point the new game had clearly done its job. Hypercharge has peaked at 555 concurrent players in the last 30 days, but there seems to be an upward trend.
Developer Digital Cybercherries’ recently announced plans to someday bring Hypercharge to Xbox and PlayStation, but that’s the only thing new about it. It’s the same game as it was a few weeks ago when hardly anyone knew about it, except it’s now surrounded by new gaming buzz.
For Digital Cybercherries, Hypercharge’s viral explosion was a happy accident.
“We’ve never veiled or misinformed players that Hypercharge isn’t out yet, and even encouraged them to check out the other platform versions,” studio rep Joe Henson told PC Gamer. “We’ve been communicating with our community about porting the game to Xbox and PlayStation, for whom this will be a brand new game, and so the communication is being tailored for that audience. But I would add that we never hide the game’s past.”
Hypercharge’s Twitter account acknowledged the game’s past battles this week Link to a 2020 feature (opens in new tab) from PCGamesN, although the tweet frames it in a “now that we’ve done it” sort of way.
According to Henson, the recent excitement began after he posted a video from the Hypercharge account of abuse he experienced from Xbox fans interested in the Hypercharge console port. “I never thought this was all going to go viral, but I was in a bad place and wanted to start a conversation with other indie developers about toxicity in the industry,” Henson said.
Developer 1047 Games pulled off a similar old-game-new-game feat with Splitgate, the arena shooter Halo with Portals, which had a moment in the spotlight this time last year. Splitgate had a huge hit when it entered its “open beta” on PC and consoles in 2021, attracting over 10 million players in a few months. However, Splitgate wasn’t a new game at the time, and it had already left its beta phase almost two years earlier.
Splitgate came out on Steam in 2019 (then still subtitled Arena Warfare) and despite generally positive impressions from us almost nobody played it.
As 1047 prepared to launch on consoles in 2021, the game was placed back into “open beta.” Even the PC version, which had been fully available for two years, suddenly became a beta. I’m not a marketer, but I think the beta tag had more to do with producing some of that new game buzz than fixing bugs that weren’t discovered in the original beta phase. And so Splitgate, the cool but struggling arena shooter from two years ago, became Splitgate, a new open beta shooter.
Promoting a game within the web’s tangled web of shifting algorithms is difficult, and making a good game doesn’t guarantee success. But when an old game is presented as a new one, I can’t help but feel like someone tried to shove one on me. It spoils some of the fun of discovering the latest new games on Twitter. I remember the excitement I felt when Dennis Gustafsson tweeted that first gameplay of teardown (opens in new tab), a destruction sandbox game that eventually became a Steam hit and one of my favorite games for years. on the other Miscellaneous On the other hand, asking the truth in marketing is about as useful as asking a mountain to move.
Hypercharge and Splitgate are hardly the only games that blur the line between old and new, or released and unreleased: games “release” all the time from early access without really changing, or go into “open beta” with one full microtransaction memory, or unlaunch and then relaunch. In a recent attempt to make sense of a strange modern game release, I came to the conclusion that Overwatch 2 isn’t really “Overwatch 2”. (opens in new tab)‘.
Did the artificial excitement around new games work?
Splitgate’s player base isn’t as big as it was a year ago, but things seem to be going well. There are still a few thousand people playing it daily on Steam, still more than enough players to support a niche arena shooter with cool ideas, and there are more players on consoles. It hasn’t maintained its peak momentum of 67,000 players in August 2021. Our taste for arena shooters may be fleeting, but 1047 Games was able to turn its enthusiasm into a $100 million funding round while it was at its peak, and the game continues to be relatively successful – Halo Infinite has more Steam at the same time, but not through the a lot of.
As for Hypercharge, the jury is still out, but so far its popularity seems to start and end at those 14 million video views. This week the number of concurrent players on Steam peaked at 555. That’s several hundred more players in Hypercharge than a few months ago, but still a far cry from its all-time high of 900 players in April 2020, the month it actually launched. It’s possible that the console versions will change that, but no release date has been announced for them yet.
The originally published version of this article has been updated to reflect comments from Digital Cybercherries.