This is a story about how 3 developers managed to make a massively multiplayer online shooter that gained over 800,000 wishlists before launch resulting in over 87,323 simultaneous players. In the 2 weeks since they launched, they sold 1,800,000 UNITS. 

This is one of those amazing successes for an indie multiplayer game. I am telling this story not because I think you should do this. This is a warning to studios trying to make a multiplayer indie game. 

I think one of the hardest things a small, first time studio can do is make a multiplayer game and they underestimate what it takes to succeed. I want you to understand how much work is required before you decide to make a multiplayer game.

There is a serious bootstrapping problem where to have a self-sustaining multiplayer game you need players and you can’t get players without having players. It is a classic chicken-and-the-egg problem. 

In today’s blog, I spoke to SgtOkiDoki who is the coder and one third of the team responsible for releasing Battlebit Remastered to hear what it takes to develop, and market a successful multiplayer game. 

“If you are planning to make a multiplayer game, dont! I am not going to lie, don’t. Make a single player game (if this is your first game). it is very trying. If you are going to accept that you are going to be slammed by a hammer.” –

SgtOkiDoki

A good game

The first requirement is your game has to be good. Like really really extremely good. This is the main reason so many games fail. If your game is just slightly unfun, people will leave faster than you can get new players to join. Imagine every 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 water stream coming feeding the bucket, the water will eventually drain to nothing. 

The team had experience before Battlebit Remastered. Two of the team members were modders for the game Unturned and Ravenfield. Check out one of the designers (Battlekot’s) Steamworks Workshop account. He has published more than 50 mods for Unturned. One of his most popular maps had over 166,000 visitors. Mods allow you to quickly iterate on designs on top of a game that already has a fanbase. You basically get to design with much less coding and no marketing.

But SgtOkiDoki notes that even that wasn’t enough to fully teach them about multiplayer map design.

“We had to add our own metrics, heatmaps etc to actually understand real problems. As from Ravenfield, the 3d modeller was just making a mod to change 3d models of scopes.”

SgtOkiDoki

Making mods is a very underrated way to improve your game development skills before jumping into full indie game development. If you play it right, you can build up an audience for your first fully-developed game.

A hot genre with an underserved audience

There is an entire sub-sub-genre of multiplayer, low poly, shooters that for some reason are rarely discussed in the indie game development twitter “discourse” but they are insanely popular. For example, Unturned has accumulated 515,000 reviews and every day has 62,000+ simultaneous players. Ravenfield has 57,250 reviews and today had over 1000 concurrent players. 

At the same time, there is a huge gap in the market. Massive multiplayer FPS games like Battlefield have become oversaturated with predatory monetization schemes and grindy metas. Players want a classic Battlefield experience without all the crap that AAA studios have been adding to them to fleece players. Watch this video called “Better than Battlefield” to get a sense of the frustration players feel

You could probably make a long indie career recreating classic games Electronic Arts has since over-monetized or abandoned. For instance Paralives is essentially a back-to-basics recreation of the Sims franchise which EA keeps bungling. Paralives has gathered an estimated 1,000,000 wishlists! 

Free tip to indie studios: Try remaking a faithful recreations of beloved EA franchise that was released in the early 2000s but has since been mismanaged. Here is a list of every game they have released. Anyone want to make a spiritual remake of Dungeon Keeper, Fight Night, Populous, or Syndicate?

Solving the cold start problem

Simon Carless wrote about how multiplayer games are “way more difficult to reach and persist at than a lot of people think.”

I asked the developer about the biggest mistake indie developers make with multiplayer games and he said “You are making a product that only works when someone else is playing. You must have a player base.”

Here is how the Battlebit team did it, year by Year

2016

First, the team started a LONG LONG LONG time ago. Battlebit was announced in Steam Greenlight over 6 and a half years ago.

To start the visibility engine the team practiced open development where people could sign up and play for free. They then grinded it out with small, hand picked playtests. At the start there were only 20-30 players at a time. They recruited these players from their Mod playerbase (see I told you mods were important).

To keep the servers full, they constrained play periods to only weekends and were diligent about messaging players about when the next one was.  

Look at the launch screen for the beta, the bottom right hand corner had a count down clock to tell you when it was opening again.

Think about it, if you want to throw a birthday party, you give people a specific date and time and it only lasts for a couple hours. You don’t tell potential party guests to just come over whenever they feel like it. Limits increase simultaneous player counts.

The team also reached out to content creators and gave them access to the closed alphas. Positive word of mouth grew here (remember this game is very well designed). 

The team also built in analytics to track where players were dying, which weapons were used, and where they were moving on the maps (again, design is super important). The game was constantly improved with each playtest making the next weekend’s playtest better than the last.

Look at some of the detailed heat map tracking the team did to constantly refine their game. 

2017

Closed playtests continued during this time period. 

I went back and rewatched this 2017 youtube video that explained how to join. Battlebit was really hard to install back then.


It is amazing anyone signed up at all. But that just shows how fun of a game it must have been for people to jump through all those hoops. 

That video has almost 80,000 views though! This game was hot.

Open development and slow growth continued on for years. They were regularly covered by streamers and slowly grew their fan base.

2018 – 2019

Player counts were still increasing buy SgtOkiDoki realized there was a problem. There was a mismatch between the marketing and the game design. 

At this point Battlebit was designed to be a hardcore simulation shooter. For instance, if you jumped high enough you could break your legs. To recover, you had to inject morphine. It was a mechanic straight out of Arma III which is a military sim. But their game didn’t look like a military sim. Their screenshots looked like:

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“They have an assumption about your game. And if the screenshots don’t match the gameplay you have a problem. Our game played like Squad but looked like Roblox. That was a terrible move” 

SgtOkiDoki

In SgtOkiDoki’s mind massive online shooters break down into two sub genres. There are arcade shooters like Fortnite, and Battlefield where you can play however you want, gameplay is more simplified, and everything is more casual. Then there are hardcore military sims like ARMA III and Squad. In those games you must roleplay and take responsibility for your actions. If you don’t you can be booted from the server. Unfortunately at this stage Battlebit looked Arcade but played Hardcore

“We had to make a decision. we had to pull back and make the game more open for arcade. It wasn’t a decision I enjoyed, but I had to do it. it turned out it was a good decision”

SgtOkiDoki

“We were doing play tests every Saturday and then through your the play test people would post in the discord I like this or I don’t like this. We could tell from the new people who joined the discord had a different set of questions. Questions more similar to a more casual audience. “

SgtOkiDoki

The team also constantly mentioned that it was a game made by 3 people. 

“They lower their expectations heavily. When you get something more than their expectations you get an extreme positivity. The lesson here is to keep expectations low and then surprise them in your gameplay”

SgtOkiDoki

2020

With the new more casual gameplay, their player base grew. They also started a patreon at this point and eventually swelled to earn $23,000 per month.

The slow build over years reached a tipping point when their server finally had more than 100 players simultaneously. The developer was so proud of this that he made a youtube video commemorating the experience.

Thank about that for a minute. It took 4 years of constant development and marketing just to get a server up to 100 simultaneous players. 

The team also started posting the game on Steam using the Playtest feature. This greatly simplified the steps and broadened their audience.

But still, they were only doing limited playtests on weekends and messaging their Discord server to fill a server.

2022

If you look up the Battlebit follower chart there is just this amazing inflection point in January 2022. 

Huge streamers famous for playing Battlefield really started playing it for long periods of time.

There isn’t any single campaign activity they did in 2022, I think this is just the network effect. Essentially 6 years of slow and steady game development and community building reached a tipping point and the game grew at an amazing rate. There is no one thing. It is just 100s of people recommending it to 100s of other people. 

2023 Launch

The launch was insane and the hundreds of thousands of wishlists were converted. Even before the launch day Valve promised them a popup. Usually popups are given after the game proves that it can convert but Valve didn’t even bother waiting. I think the huge number of wishlists and the team’s constant updates and playtests proved to Valve that this game was going to convert. 

The work to get here was the result of years of work. It isn’t just some viral moment or a stroke of luck. It is a constant, regular effort over time.

Summary

Again, I tell the team’s story of Battlebit Remastered as a warning. If you are thinking of making a multiplayer game at indie scale you need to be ready to spend YEARS honing your design experience (Battlekot’s first mod was uploaded in 2015), building up a community by personally inviting players, verifying that the game is fun (detailed player stat tracking), and networking with streamers. 

A hit like this is not just some viral moment that came from nowhere because of luck. 

If you absolutely must make a multiplayer game, consider making a co-op game that doesn’t require matching random players who don’t know each other. Or, consider just making mods for an already popular multiplayer game. 

Remember one final quote from SgtOkiDoki “If you are planning to make a multiplayer game, dont! I am not going to lie, don’t. Make a single player game (if this is your first game). it is very trying. If you are going to accept that you are going to be slammed by a hammer.”