Should We Make This Game?

push to talk #37 // on byte breakers and a new approach to early testing

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This week’s newsletter is a short one. Things got a little hectic with the day job.

On Wednesday, the team at Odyssey Interactive revealed a new game prototype we’re calling Byte Breakers. It’s a 40-player platform fighter (think Smash Bros.) with battle royale elements.

The twist is that we might not actually ship this game. We’re openly telling players that the playtests we’re running on Steam will determine whether or not we move forward with development on it.

Here’s the full announce video we put out for Byte Breakers:

The response to this approach has been extremely fun to watch. The message got decent pickup on social, from content creators, and with press, so last night we decided to go ahead and open the playtest servers a little early (only for players in the US, Canada, and Mexico) so we could see how this game really plays in the wild.

The main thing I’ve heard from industry peers is something like “This is awesome, but you’re not really serious about potentially killing it, right?” And the answer is: we’re dead serious. If this game hits our targets, we’re gonna double down on it, run tons more playtests, and push hard toward a release. But if it doesn’t bang? It gets the icebox.

Partly, we’re able to say this and mean it because Byte Breakers is not the only game we’re working on. There’s other stuff in the hopper that can absorb headcount if Byte Breakers doesn’t work out. After all, this is a game that’s been in development with a small core team (about 10 people) for less than a year.

But there’s more to it, too. It’s a philosophical change about how we want to make games.

In the video above, Odyssey co-founders Dax and Richard talked about how we don’t want to repeat the experience we had with Omega Strikers. OS is an amazing game that reached millions of players, but it took us over three years of work to find out and fully accept that it didn’t have legs as a live service. When we announced our plan to keep the game running while moving the dev team on to a new project, players were unbelievably kind to us in response. I still get emotional reading the comments on that video.

But we’re not doing that again. For Odyssey’s next games, we’re going to get market signal early. We’re not going to rely on just player feedback, or just survey data, or just private playtests, or just reactions to trailers, or—God forbid—the opinions of a greenlight committee. All that stuff is good and useful (well, most of it is), but none of it tells you whether or not your game has what it takes to pop off. It doesn’t tell you how people are really going to treat your game, once it’s out in the wild. It doesn’t tell you what your K-factor is going to be.

So before we launch a new game, we’re going to go out there early—much earlier than most devs would feel comfortable even teasing a game.

And then? Well. We’ll see what happens.

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That’s it for this week. Next week I’ll be back with an interview with an under-discussed indie game dev.

Now I’m gonna go get absolutely clapped in Byte Breakers by a bunch of people who literally started playing yesterday

I’ll see you next Friday.