A relatively small Christchurch-based video game developer has a surprise hit on its hands.
Digital Confectioners created the game Dread Hunger with the hope of maybe reaching 10,000 people in the US.
To their surprise, China is where it's taken off, with more than 260,000 people logging on to play every day.
Dread Hunger video game. Photo: Digital Confectioners
The small team of game developers based in Ōtautahi, Christchurch, are stoked with the response, says marketing and communications coordinator Romy Gellen.
The idea came from a combination of survival and social deception games, where you have a group of players try and deduce who the traitor is among them, Gellen says.
“As game developers, we’re not always just making games but we’re also playing them and back in late 2019, we started development after playing social deception games like Secret Hitler and Mafia.
“We were really keen to create something like that but with survival elements, so marrying the two genres just made total sense to us.”
Dread Hunger is about eight explorers who venture into the unforgiving Arctic, searching for a safe passage, and among them are two traitors who seek to undermine the expedition by any means necessary, whether that’s poisoning the crew or stabbing them in the back.
Sales of the game started to increase during the early access period and right before its full release, Gellen says.
“That was promising and somewhat expected, then they just kept going up and up and up, at a crazy pace, so much so that … we were experiencing like 10,000 new concurrent players each week.”
Dread Hunger video game. Photo: Digital Confectioners
It turns out that social deception games are huge in China, she says, with a local Mafia-version game already popular there called ‘werewolf’.
“It’s just like any other hidden role, live role-playing game, some people might have played Mafia so it’s essentially that Among Us craze that was in the Western sphere but because we translated it and localised Dread Hunger into Chinese, we tapped into that huge audience and by delivering a fresh take on what they consider a classic, it just went from there.
“We reached over 100,000 concurrent players at one point, and a few weeks ago we sold a million copies. So, it’s definitely gone above and beyond our expectations which is just amazing.”
Players have become so engaged with the game that there’s already fanfiction and fan art surfacing, she says.
“People are role-playing with the game, like really getting into character, because I guess it’s given them that platform, that canvas for it, because it’s set in the 1800s and it’s on a warship in the middle of the Canadian Arctic and actually based off of real events, some people may be familiar with the Franklin expedition.”
The massive number of players logging on to the game has also been a learning curve for the small company, Gellen says.
“[We’ve been] having to take night shifts to check on things and experiencing hundreds of thousands of players online at any given stage means that our security and infrastructure needs to be really tight.
“So that has certainly strengthened our skillset and been a challenge having to work with such big numbers.”
*Warning: Dread Hunger includes graphic content.
