How Hypercharge scaled its Xbox version to a Top 10 win!

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[The GameDiscoverCo game discovery newsletter is written by ‘how people find your game’ expert & company founder Simon Carless, and is a regular look at how people discover and buy video games in the 2020s.]

We’re back, still decompressing from that ‘not E3’ game avalanche, as decried in an new op-ed from Nathan Brown: “This non-stop sensory assault is no good for viewers, who simply cannot digest it, and even worse for developers, who desperately want us to both notice and remember their games.” (Sadly, there’s no video game equivalent of OPEC.)

Before we get going with our main story: if you’re a paid subscriber & got a Google alert about a GDCo password problem, fear not! It's referencing our old 'generic' (same for all) Plus login, which we quit using years ago. (Your real/current PWs are safe.)

[REMINDER: yes, you can support GameDiscoverCo by subscribing to GDCo Plus now. You get full access to a super-detailed Steam data suite for unreleased & released games, weekly PC/console sales newsletters, Discord access, eight game discovery eBooks & lots more.]

Hypercharge: an indie FPS success excels on Xbox

We’ve been checking out the recent release of Hypercharge Unboxed on Xbox. It’s made by a small 6-person UK team, Digital Cybercherries, including Joe Henson, who we’ve featured before for getting the Paranormal Tales trailer trending on Steam.

Anyhow, it’s fair to say that the game (above), which is a Small Soldiers/Toy Story-ish FPS, is doing great on Xbox for a small indie team. In fact, Joe tells us that it’s already sold 80,000 units on the platform in just a couple of weeks - impressive. (It’s also at #3 in ‘Top Paid Games’ on the U.S. Xbox store right now.)

We were able to back up these numbers using GameDiscoverCo’s sales estimates on Xbox, which uses various public data points to estimate players on the platform. (The Steam version of Hypercharge has been around since 2017, and GDCo estimates it at around 250k units sold.)

So before we talk about why, let’s put Hypercharge’s Xbox performance in context. Here’s our ranking estimates for the top new non-F2P, non-Game Pass Xbox debuts for the last 3 months, across physical and digital:

Obviously, a lot of the top titles arrive on Day 1 on Game Pass nowadays. But in ‘paid only’-land, Dragon’s Dogma 2 is way out in front as the top game - and Hypercharge Unboxed is already at #6 for the last quarter, digital only.

There’s also another indie FPS title at #7 - Sker Ritual, which we actually covered last month for the newsletter. (Before we hear ‘Xbox ded’ complaints, Hypercharge’s Xbox LTD units would have put it at #15 in PlayStation ‘new paid non-PS+ game’ sales in the last quarter - not that much lower.)

Anyhow, let’s get back to the ‘why is this game selling on Xbox?’ question. We chatted to Joe about it, and we think the following are major contributing factors:

• Family-friendly ‘local splitscreen’ multiplayer FPSes are thin on the ground: Joe sent over Tweets of parents and their kids playing together, noting the game “offers a unique ‘cross-generational nostalgia’”. The lack of local splitscreen games on console is a niche opportunity - but an opportunity nonetheless! (And the game also has a full suite of online modes.)

• The game’s ‘look’ is broadly interesting & primed for virality: from the first Twitter announce of the Xbox version to viral TikToks extracting ‘streamer highlight’ C-130 runs from the Steam version of the game, the social campaigns for this game were on point. Look at the ‘hook’ for this TikTok with 1.2 million likes, for example.

• Hypercharge is fully-featured, has no IAP, and a LOT of modes: cross-platform online play & game modes added over the last 6+ years of continuous PC dev mean one Xbox player says: “This game is pure fun and not a money grab like most games today. No microtransactions and tons of customization all unlockable in game!”

One major difficulty with scaling console games nowadays is reaching ‘casual’ players. It’s clear that Hypercharge has done it repeatedly by making organically viral videos on TikTok and other platforms, based on the game’s strong visual & concept hook.

Per Joe, from May 1st to 31st, Hypercharge’s own social media managed the following: “TikTok: 14+ million views; Instagram Reels: 4+ million views; Twitter: 7.5+ million views; Facebook Reels: 3.5+ million views.” This resulted in nearly 10k pre-orders of the game, and 23k Xbox wishlists - big numbers for a small indie.

One interesting meta-tip from Joe: “I often revisit successful [TikTok] videos to analyze their performance data, such as viewer retention rates. This analysis helps me identify exactly when viewers tend to lose interest. I then use this insight to make targeted edits to the original video.” Slight variants of the same message are just fine - different people see them.

There was one final question we asked Joe & team. Why just launch this on Xbox, when it’s generally agreed that the platform has ~50% of the console install-base of PlayStation? (We actually estimate Sker Ritual did ~3x better on PS than Xbox..)

This was just down to small-team bandwidth, the indie-friendly Xbox folks sending the team devkits first, and Xbox players responding well to the console SKU announce. (You’ve got to imagine a PlayStation version is in Hypercharge’s future tho?)

Frankly, Hypercharge Unboxed in no way looks like an ‘indie’ game - and is another example of how the democratization of game tools means skilled micro-teams can compete with much bigger teams and games, if given the correct hook & marketing.

The most-streamed games, May 2024 edition…

Every month, we collab with livestream analytics platform Stream Hatchet - which grabs data from lots of (non-China) game streaming platforms: “Twitch, YouTube Live Gaming, Facebook Live, AfreecaTV, Kick, Steam, NaaverTV, Trovo, Rooter, Nonolive, Openrec, Loco, Mildom, DLive, VK, KakaoTV, Garena LIVE, Booyah.”

The Stream Hatchet folks wrote about the Top 20 most-streamed games of May 2024, and once again us a full list of the Top 100 games(Google Drive doc) for us to noodle with. Here’s what we spotted this time:

• Minecraft’s 15th anniversary boosted the game majorly: that’s right, Minecraft turned 15 in May, and helped by Twitch’s official promotions such as exclusive emotes and badges, plus a homepage ‘Minecraft Shelf’, people watched for 76.8 million hours (#4), up 2.73x month on month.

• Elden Ring excitement? Hella amplified by Kai Cenat: as we know, the Elden Ring DLC is coming in June, and there’s going to be a big boost in hours watched this month. But May saw hours up 2.83x to 31.9 million (#11), partly due to Twitch superstar Kai Cenat having 13 million Elden Ring hours streamed (!) in May.

• Arena Breakout, Wuthering Waves, XDefiant lead new releases for May: extraction shooter Arena Breakout was very well-received in Beta (#22, 16.4m hours), and Genshin Impact-like Wuthering Waves (#31, 10.5m) and Ubisoft’s team shooter XDefiant (#32, 10.4m) all had impressive starts out of the gate.

Otherwise, there’s quite a few games surging with big updates: V Rising up 30x (!) to 11.4 million hours watched, due to a 1.0 release and console ports, Diablo IV up 6x to 11 million hours due to a new in-game season, and even the mythical Star Citizen up 3.8x to 7.2 million hours due to a bigger new update.

Finally, lower-down new entries include upcoming Overwatch-like Marvel Rivals (#59 via a Beta), indie co-op stand-out Abiotic Factor (#73), Multiversus’ relaunch putting it back in the Top 100, though only just (#91), and Hellblade II sneaking in there all the way down at #100, with 2 million hours watched.

The game platform & discovery news round-up…

Well, our full Steam Next Fest postmortem is coming next Monday. But for GDCo Plus subscribers, we whipped up a real-time dashboard of how the Next Fest demos are doing(above) in the meantime, sorted by ‘Steam follower increases since Fest start’.

And while you all peruse that, let’s have a zoom around notable discovery news:

• We found this ‘explainer’ on Roblox’s revenues & demographics helpful. For example: “Roblox's user base spans a wide age range, with a notable concentration of younger users from Gen Z and Gen Alpha: Over 13 years old: 44.9 million DAUs (57.8%); Under 13 years old: 32.1 million DAUs (41.3%).”

• Looks like we have a likely date for the next Nintendo Direct - a briefly (accidentally) public Among Us-related video went up dated June 18th, and “Innersloth has previously revealed updates in Nintendo Directs [with] the words “available now”.” So that’s our bet - let’s find out next week!

• Summer Game Fest only just happened, but it’s confirmed as returning next June: “We're thrilled to announce that Summer Game Fest will return to Los Angeles in June 2025, including [invite-only media, influencer, and a few biz folks event] Play Days from iam8bit, and a livestreamed showcase event that fans can attend.”

• Valve is being sued at the UK Competition Tribunal, and the suit “accuses Valve of "shutting out" competition in the PC gaming market. It says Valve "forces" game publishers to sign up to so-called price parity obligations, preventing titles being sold at cheaper prices on rival platforms.” (It’s the same folks who attacked Sony for similar reasons, and has parallels with the separate Valve x Wolfire lawsuit in the U.S.)

• Look, there’s a ‘game’ called Banana which has 250,000 CCU on Steam and Polygon breaks down what the heck’s going on with the clicker: “Each banana is an item that goes into your Steam inventory, where they can then be bought and sold on the Steam Marketplace…. It’s not really an NFT, but it kind of works that way.” How… fun.

• This rare retrospective interview with Sony’s PS5 hardware architect Mark Cerny is, as ever, fascinating. For example: “I see people asking… if the time to triangle has been greatly reduced, why is it then taking so many years to create a game? And the answer is - that is what the teams are choosing to do.”

• There are now four App Store alternatives live on iOS in Europe, including the Aptoide games store. But noted tech trend newsletter-er Benedict Evans is skeptical: “It solves very few real user problems, and given the EU is only 8% of Apple App Store revenue it’s hard for a developer to invest time in it.”

• The dev of Farewell North was in both Feb ‘22 and June ‘24 Steam Next Fests (since the first was before ‘only do one Next Fest!’ rules were instituted), and has some comments: “The competition is just much, much higher for these festivals than it used to… So far we're on pace to do about half the wishlists we did in Feb '22.”

• The Verge points out that: “As of June 10th, Nintendo has officially discontinued support for the Switch console’s integration with X (formerly Twitter), making it the last of the current-gen consoles to do so after Microsoft and Sony disabled their own access last year.” (Due to licensing fees, mainly?)

• This interview with Netflix’s Leanne Loombe has some good tidbits: “Our North Star is to have a game on Netflix that appeals to every one of our members.” And also on ‘Netflix x TVs’: “We now have a very limited test running in eight countries with just a handful of games that test our game streaming technology and Netflix second screen controller.”

Finally, the Unauthorizon database is a spectacular online database of bootleg NES, Genesis and other consoles. (So much jank!) But we just had to highlight their latest find, the V-Play, a ‘retro games’ handheld that’s also an… e-cigarette/vape? *shudder*:

[We’re GameDiscoverCo, an agency based around one simple issue: how do players find, buy and enjoy your PC or console game? We run the newsletter you’re reading, and provide consulting services for publishers, funds, and other smart game industry folks.]