The indie game devs behind Hypercharge, a Toy Soldiers-inspired game where you play as action figures shooting each other with toy weapons, roasted someone who claimed their game is dead because it doesn’t have many players online.
Making a multiplayer-only game in 2025 is a tall order. There are so many live service games that are vying for people’s attention that it’s incredibly hard to convince people to drop the games they’re already playing and have been playing for years. Good multiplayer games getting shut down is nothing new.
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This is especially true of a small dev team that doesn’t have the same sort of marketing push behind them or the ability to support a live service model robust enough to go free-to-play.
And, while Hypercharge isn’t exactly exploding in popularity in the years after release, the devs fought back against the narrative that their game is dead just because players can’t find full matches online.
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Hypercharge devs push back on dead game narrative
When it comes to most live-service games out there, multiplayer is no longer accessible once servers go down. Most of the world’s most played games are on a clock that runs the risk of ending at any time if the devs decide to shut down service. That’s the reality of modern multiplayer games.
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However, Hypercharge is a paid title with options to fill matches with bot opponents and play in a LAN setup. As long as the game is live on storefronts and installed on your system, it’ll be playable.
And, though it isn’t nearly as popular now as it was upon release, the devs are still proud of what they made. Someone called out Hypercharge, calling it a “failure” and claiming the devs were “lazy” and looking for a cash grab now that their game has released on PlayStation.
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HyperchargeSplit screen is one of Hypercharge’s biggest selling points, bringing back couch co-op.
“Maybe there aren’t thousands of players online. But somewhere, someone’s on the couch with their kid, playing split-screen, laughing, figuring things out together, side by side. If that’s all Hypercharge ever is… that’s enough for us. Not every game is meant to be online-only.”
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This tweet went viral, resulting in the dev team making a larger statement on the topic.
“We made the game we always wanted as kids. And yes, it’s cliché, but it’s true. When you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life. As long as we can pay the bills, feed our families, and keep creating what we care about, then yeah, in our eyes, we’re already rich. That is what success means to us,” reads a portion of their statement.
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All of Hypercharge’s cosmetics are earned in game, with their being no microtransactions
The devs claimed they didn’t go with a free-to-play model because they believe that’s not the only way to make a successful multiplayer game.
“I’m used to the comments. ‘Dead on arrival.’ ‘Free to play or not play’ Or, ‘How do you make money without some free to play business model?’ The answer is simple. You make a damn good game. Hypercharge will never bee free to play. It will never have in-game microtransactions battle passes, etc. Will we lose money doing that? Or miss out on millions of players? Maybe.
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“But what we won’t lose is sleep by going against what we believe in,” the statement concludes.
Even if unintentionally, this viral saga has brought a ton of publicity to their game and has a chance of boosting player counts more than a pricy ad campaign would.
