GameLook has previously reported on a popular FPS game “Battlebit Remastered” on the Steam platform. The style of the development team is quite strange: there are only three members, but they are hard-headed in the online multiplayer online category; the low-polygon style of the game is like Roblox, but this game, which can be called the “bankrupt version of Battlefield”, has attracted a lot of attention. Tickets for fans of the 3A game “Battlefield” series to play.
“Battlebit Remastered” will be released on June 15th. Within two weeks of its release, the game sold over 1.8 million copies. As of the writing, this game has stuck to the fourth place on the Steam bestseller list. What’s even more frightening is that, judging from the number of concurrent online players, even though it has been three weeks since its launch, there is no sign of players leaving, and the game’s CCU has remained steadily at the daily peak level of 80,000. It shows how addictive its core gameplay is.
If you look at it a few years ago, this game can be said to have gathered the most common project approval points in the perception of the FPS category: low image quality, online battlefield, novice developers, zero purchases, and global servers. Rather, the cost of server operation alone has discouraged many mature teams. Under such circumstances, this “Battlebit Remastered” insists on going retrograde and embarking on a road to explosion. How exactly?
Recently, overseas independent game analyst Chris Zukowski interviewed SgtOkiDoki, one of the three main creators, and shared the development story behind the game. Despite the success, what SgtOkiDoki thinks in his heart is to persuade him to quit: stop doing online games, run!
Without him, the path of “Battlebit Remastered” is too difficult.
How difficult is it? The game started to be established and tested in 2016, and then began to sit on the bench for five years. The development team began to recruit test players from 2016, but it was not until 2020 that 100 players went online at the same time. With no profit prospects, less than 10,000 Steam wishlists, and no external funds, no one knows whether it will be able to earn back its costs in the future.
If it weren’t for the occasional large wave of traffic attracted by the anchor of “Battlefield” in 2022, it would be impossible for this game to set a sales volume of 1.8 million in two weeks. But on the other hand, without the persistent testing and polishing in the first 5 years, it is impossible for the development team to capture this fleeting window. The birth of explosive models often seems to be full of luck, but behind it is the blood and tears of three developers for six years.
GameLook compiled the full text of this blog post by Chris Zukowski:
This is a story about how 3 developers managed to make a massively multiplayer online shooter. The game received more than 800,000 Steam wishlists before its launch, and the number of concurrent online players exceeded 80,000. Within two weeks of launch, they sold a solid 1.8 million units.
For an indie game that focuses on multiplayer, this is an astonishing success. But I tell this story not because I think you should emulate them, but as a warning to studios trying to make multiplayer indie games.
I think for a small studio making a game for the first time, making a multiplayer game is going to be overwhelming. They tend to underestimate the effort it takes to be successful. I hope you have the right idea of the workload before deciding to make a multiplayer game.
One of the serious problems is that to make a viable multiplayer game you need players, and without players you can’t get new players. This is a classic chicken-and-egg problem.
In today’s blog, I interview SgtOkiDoki, one-third of the development team on Battlebit Remastered, and let’s hear what it takes to develop and sell a successful multiplayer game.
SgtOkiDoki: “If you’re going to make a multiplayer game, stop it! I kid you not, don’t do it! I kid you not, don’t do it! If it’s your first game, make a It’s a single-player game. Doing a multiplayer game takes a lot of effort, unless you go into it with a certain death mindset.”
make a good game
The first requirement is that your game must be good, that is, the quality is quite, very good. This is also the main reason why many games fail. If your game is just slightly less fun, people will leave faster than you can attract new players to join. Think of each game as a bucket with a hole in the bottom, the worse the game, the bigger the hole. If the hole is bigger than the flow of water into the bucket, the water will eventually flow to nothing.
The team has prior experience working on Battlebit Remastered. Two members of the team were former modders for the games Unturned and Ravenfield. Judging from the Steamworks Workshop account of one of the designers (Battlekot), he has released over 50 mods for Unturned. One of his most popular maps has over 166,000 visitors. Mods allow designers to quickly iterate on a game that already has enough fan base, so that it can basically learn the essence of design with less code and minimal marketing efforts.
But even that wasn’t enough to fully teach them about multiplayer map design, SgtOkiDoki pointed out.
“We had to add our own data points, heatmaps, etc. to really understand the real problem. Like from Ravenfield, the 3D modeler just made a mod to change the size of the 3D model.”
SgtOkiDoki advises: “Making mods is a very underrated way of improving game development skills before fully joining indie game development. If you mod well, you can build an audience for your first fully developed game .”
A red-hot category with an undersupplied offering
For some reason, the super niche genre of “multiplayer, low-poly, shooters” is rarely discussed in indie game development circles, yet they are very popular. For example, “Unturned” has accumulated 515,000 Steam store reviews, and the number of daily concurrent online players exceeds 60,000. Ravenfield has 57,250 reviews and over 1,000 concurrent players today.
Ravenfield game screen
At the same time, there is a huge gap in the market. Massively multiplayer FPS games like Battlefield have been pushed to the point of oversaturation. Players want the classic Battlefield experience, but want to get rid of all the crap that AAA studios put in to trick players. A viral video titled “Battlebit is better than Battlefield” reflects this frustration among players.
In a market that has been lingering due to the commercialization of EA and other major manufacturers, there may be hope for survival. Paralives, for example, is essentially a back-to-basics re-creation of EA’s constantly screwed-up Sims franchise, which has amassed over a million Steam wishlists to date.
Free advice to indie studios: Find an EA IP that was released in the early 2000s but has since been mismanaged, and make a faithful remake. Anyone want a spiritual sequel to Dungeon Keeper, Fight Night, Populous or Syndicate?
Solve the problem of cold start
Independent games analyst Simon Carless writes that multiplayer games are harder to deliver and stick to than many imagine.
I asked a developer about the biggest mistake an indie game makes with multiplayer, and he said, “You have to make a product that enough people can play. You have to build a player base.”
Here’s what the Battlebit Remastered team has put into it:
2016
First, the team started a long, long time ago. “Battlebit Remastered” was announced in the Steam Green Light program 6 and a half years ago.
In order to hot start the player group, the team implemented an open development model. People could sign up and play for free, and then they hand-built a small batch of beta versions of the game to hone in on. At the beginning, there are only 20-30 players at a time, all recruited from the previous mod player base.
To keep their servers full, they limit play to weekends and diligently message players when their next play is due. There’s also a countdown timer in the lower right corner of the beta’s splash screen, telling players when it will open again.
As an analogy, when throwing a birthday party, you give your friends a specific date and time, and the line only lasts a few hours. You don’t tell potential party guests that they can come if they want. While limiting, the number of simultaneous players can be increased.
The team is also extending an olive branch to content creators, giving streamers access to a closed beta client. Due to the outstanding quality of the game itself, a good reputation has accumulated through word of mouth.
The team also built in a analytics feature that tracks where players die, which weapons they use, and where they move across the map (again, game design is super important). The game continues to improve with each test, making next weekend’s playtest results even better than the last.
Take a look at a series of detailed heatmap tracks the team has been working on as they continue to refine the game.
2017
During this time, closed playtesting continues. At this time, the installation of the game is still quite difficult. I found a YouTube tutorial from that year, and it took 12 minutes to teach players how to install the client of the game.
In this case, there are still people who signed up to participate. But it just goes to show that the game must be pretty fun for people. This instructional video has nearly 80,000 views, which directly proves the popularity of this game.
Open development and slow growth continued for several years. The game began to be gradually introduced by game anchors, and gradually expanded the fan base.
2018-2019
Player numbers were still rising, but SgtOkiDoki realized there was a problem: there was a mismatch between marketing and game design.
Battlebit Remastered was designed as a hardcore simulation shooter. For example, if you jump from a height, your leg may be broken. In order to recover, you will have to inject pain relievers. This is a mechanic directly referenced from the military sim Arma 3. But their game doesn’t look like a military sim.
2019 game test screen
“Players have an assumption about your game. If the screenshots don’t match the gameplay, you have a problem. Our game plays like Arma but looks like Roblox. It’s bad design.”
In SgtOkiDoki’s view, massive online shooters can be divided into two sub-genres, there are arcade shooters like Fortnite and Battlefield, where you can play as much as you want, with more simplified gameplay, Everything is more casual. Then there are hardcore military sims like ARMA III and Tactics Squad. In these games, you have to role-play and take responsibility for your actions. If you don’t, you will be kicked off the server. Unfortunately, at this stage, Battlebit Remastered looks arcade oriented, but the gameplay is hardcore oriented.
“We had to make a decision. We had to back off and make the game more arcade-style. It wasn’t a decision I liked, but I had to. It turned out to be a good one.” – SgtOkiDoki
“We playtest every Saturday, and then through your playtest, people post feedback in the discussion boards. We can hear from people who are new to the discussion group that they have different questions. These questions are more related to Casual audience.”
The team also keeps educating players that this is a game made by only 3 people: “They will lower their expectations significantly. And when the final product exceeds their expectations, we will receive super positive feedback. Therefore, here The best lesson is to keep expectations low and then surprise players with your game.”
With the launch of new, more casual ways of playing, the player base of the game is getting bigger and bigger. So they opened a Patreon account, and developed to a monthly income of $23,000 a month just from players’ rewards.
The slow build-up over the years led to a turning point where their servers finally had over 100 simultaneous players. The developers are so proud of this that they made a YouTube video to commemorate the experience. It took 4 years of non-stop development and marketing just to get 100 simultaneous players on one server!
The team also started publishing the game on Steam using the Playtest feature. This greatly simplifies the steps of installation and download, and expands the audience of the game. However, they still only do closed playtests on weekends and message their Discord server to augment the game’s servers.
2022
If you look at Battlebit’s follower chart, in January 2022 there was such an amazing inflection point: a group of top streamers who are famous for playing “Battlefield” actually started playing “Battlebit Remastered” for a long time.
They didn’t do any specific marketing moves in 2022. I think it’s just network effects. Six years of slow and steady game development and community building have changed from quantitative to qualitative, and the game has begun to grow at an alarming rate. There is no special time, it is entirely based on the accumulation of word of mouth.
Official release in 2023
The game’s final release day arrived, and the sales were pretty crazy. Hundreds of thousands of wishlists began to be converted into actual game sales. Valve promised them a pop-up slot even before the game’s release. Normally, this slot is reserved for games that get enough wishlist conversions, but Valve isn’t willing to wait even a second. I think the massive wishlist, constant updates from the team, and consistent playtesting are a testament to Valve’s sales potential.
Up to now, it relies on the accumulation of years of work results. The success of the game is not based on a single viral moment, nor is it a random stroke of luck. It is the continuous and long-term efforts of the team, which ushered in the accumulation of accumulation at the last moment.
Summarize
The reason I want to tell the story of Battlebit Remastered is to offer a warning. If you want to make an indie multiplayer game, you need to be prepared to spend a few years honing your design experience “Battlekot’s first mod was uploaded in 2015” by personally inviting players to build a A community of players, verifying that the game is fun (establishing a detailed player data tracking system), and connecting with game streamers.
The birth of a hit game like this is not due to luck or so-called virality.
If you must make a multiplayer game, you might consider making it a co-op game, so you don’t need to match random players you don’t know. Alternatively, you might consider making a mod for an already popular multiplayer game.
Remember this quote from SgtOkiDoki: “If you’re going to make a multiplayer game, stop it! I kid you not, don’t do it! I kid you, don’t do it! If it’s your first A game, let’s make a single-player game. Doing a multiplayer game takes a huge amount of effort, unless you go in with a certain death mindset.”
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