3M wishlists, 10M views, and 1,000-hour games | Alex Nichiporchik interview

Last year didn’t end well with layoffs at Tinybuild as it shut down indie game publisher Versus Evil and laid off 13 staff before the holidays.

But since the beginning of the year, the company has shown improvement. Tinybuild generated over three million wishlists across its portfolio, its playable demos got over 10 million views on YouTube, and players spent 1.8 million hours in its game demos — or over 200 years of in-game time. The past month was the best one for traction in Tinybuild’s history.

And that has prompted Alex Nichiporchik, CEO of Tinybuild, to start talking about his ambition to create 1,000-hour games again. The top wishlisted games from Tinybuild include Level Zero Extraction, Drill Core, Duckside, Streets of Rogue 2, LZE, Sand, Ferocious and (my favorite) Kingmakers, which featured historically inaccurate medieval fighting. They’re all in the top 200 wishlist chart on Steam.

The key to getting these games is a focus on playtests, game re-announcements, and more. The company saw success with marketing efforts like April Fool’s jokes, a publisher sale and the Steam Next Fest.

Nichiporchik said the hypothesis is simple: if players spend a lot of time in your game, you have a much better chance of long-term sustainability and often your initial sales aren’t the bulk of your total sales. If players play your game for a thousand hours, that’s money. Because time is currency, and everybody is competing for a slice of the player’s time.

The Kingmakers tweet with amazing gameplay of taking modern weapons into a medieval battle got more than 18 million views. In this case, Tinybuild tested the game from a solo dev as early as possible. It didn’t let the players in all at once. It let the enthusiasm build and then let everyone loose.

With Duckside, the company announced it in an April Fool’s joke with a trailer on April 1 that said it was “too good looking to be fake.” That announcement had a call-to-action to sign up for the playtest, and more than 70,000 players signed up to “join the flock.” A few weeks later, it opened the playtest and it hit a player peak of 1,600 concurrent users. Tinybuild billed the game as “ducks with guns.”

Meanwhile, Level Zero Extraction was announced a few years back as an Evolve-style asymmetric horror game. It got some initial traction, but last year the team decided to pivot it into a multiplayer hardcore survival shooter game. And so they re-announced the game with a cool new trailer.

And at the Steam Next Festival, TinyBuild was able to get a total of a million hours in-game played by players who tried the playtests and demos for just three games: Level Zero Extraction, Duckside and Drill Core. That is 114 years.

The common thread in all of the games is that they’re designed to be played for 1,000 hours. Nichiporchik started talking about this a few years ago, and it takes years to develop games. You have to see what works and adapt your strategy. And use hard data to make decisions.

Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.

Alex Nichiporchik: We’ve had some bad news and some encouraging news. I’m excited about the stuff that’s happening right now. Despite the triple-A side of things, the industry is looking up. There might be space to talk about optimism.

For me it’s all about the verification part. Marketing has changed significantly. Players now are much more in tune with how game development works. You can talk a lot about the promises you make to players, but it’s all about verifying that players actually want what you’re developing.

GamesBeat: What’s on your mind, then?

Nichiporchik: In my mind it’s about how you compete in an industry that’s so–not just competitive, but saturated. You have the tools at your fingertips to create games. All of the platforms are open. You have so much entertainment out there. A new Netflix show drops on the same day as your game – if that show goes viral, it sucks all the air out.

What’s been on my mind is how you capture the attention of players. How do you measure objectively, with data, that players like your game? That’s what keeps me awake. Over the past year or so, I’ve been talking about our “1000-hour” game concept. How do you make something that, with its core game loop, can captivate the player over a period of, say, a year, for 1000 hours? The data we have on the portfolio shows that the games with the longest tail of sales have a direct relation with a very high average spend. Using that, we then allot investment into technology and our publishing teams and marketing efforts to get players into games as early as possible.

GamesBeat: The examples of that–you looked to Rust. Are there other games you had in mind that accomplished this?

Nichiporchik: Rust has been one of my favorite games over the past decade now. It’s interesting to see what Facepunch has achieved there. While a lot of triple-A games as a service–they go into seasons. They have a season with an update and a marketing campaign around that. Games like Rust, which are systems-driven by default, they don’t have these seasons. They just have a very strict update schedule, usually monthly or every several months. You’re able to get players in with new features. You don’t need to market it as a season.

To me, whenever I look at some of the larger games, I see that it’s season X. I last played three years ago. I need to catch up on all this. It can come off as intimidating to the player. Instead we decided, why don’t we focus our investments on high replayability, on social interaction, on games that you can just continue playing. I call that emergent gameplay. It’s been a buzzword in the industry for a while. But really, it’s the unpredictable behavior of players. When you give them different tools and they combine those tools and systems in ways you don’t expect.

Also, in reference to Rust, it’s about a flexible definition of winning. Most games will have a definite–you win or you lose. In Counter-Strike you win or you lose. But for us it’s about, how do you make a reward system where the player decides whether a reward is a win condition or not? It might be that they achieve something in the game that feels like a win to them. That creates a lot of different variety in the scenarios. It enables players to spend thousands of hours in our games. That’s what I see in the portfolio with our data. That’s what we want to test with our upcoming portfolio, something we just did during the festival last week.

GamesBeat: Upcoming games that show some promise on that level–you had the new horror Level Zero extraction game. What are some games in the portfolio you had in mind that are designed in this way?

Nichiporchik: All of the games that we have in the Steam Next festival are designed like this. Level Zero: Extraction is an asymmetrical extraction horror game. Think Alien Isolation meets Escape from Tarkov. Then there’s Duckside. People are calling it Rust with ducks. We took the engine of our game called Deadside, which is kind of DayZ in a persistent world, a survival game. We took that engine and played around with one of our internal studios. What if you played as a duck? The biggest issue we have in survival games with an open world is running. No one likes running for half an hour. But what if you could fly? That game has shown a lot of promise.

The third example here was a surprise for us. It’s called Drill Core. You mine planets. The way I like to describe it, it’s like Kingdom Rush meets Minesweeper. Very meditative game, very systems-driven. We were surprised, when we launched a small playtest, that it retained players for dozens of hours with a very limited feature set. Even though, unlike the other two, it’s a single-player game, it still retains players for a very long time.

These three games follow that mantra in different subgenres. Single-player systems-driven, multiplayer open world survival, and session-based horror. But they all have this encompassing theory that if players spend a lot of time in your game, if you design it that way, then you will find success. We’ve done it so far.

GamesBeat: What are the indicators? Is it how they were viewed or played in the Steam Next festival?

Nichiporchik: There was a multi-stage process here. We did individual announcements for Level Zero and Duckside. With Level Zero being announced in late February and a playtest following quite shortly after. We measured the time spent. We got a lot of feedback. A lot of design decisions went into further development. We announced that the game is launching on August 6, by the way. That feedback, and the hard data we saw, the stats we gathered, we used that to tweak the game based on a few theories and make it into a demo for the Steam Next festival.

With Duckside we did a cheeky thing where we made a trailer and published it on April 1. Everyone thought it had to be a joke. But we opened up signups for this new playtest. Then we did the same thing. We did the playtest. We got a lot of data. We got a lot of information on where the game breaks technically. Open world survival games are difficult to do. When you’re able to build bases, when it’s all fair game, when there’s no level gating or anything like that, your skill is your level. You can lose everything at any time.

That culminated in May when we did our publisher sale. We combined that with tinyBuild Connect, which was amplified by the sale. We did a bunch of announcements which boosted our wishlists and awareness for the games. During that time we did something that usually you shouldn’t do. We announced a new game, Drill Core, and said, “Play it right now. Get into the playtest.” We hoped that a few players would join and give us some data. Thousands of people joined and contributed to the 1.8 million hours spent in our demos. All of these free playables–with that hype, we got into the Steam Next festival.

The one thing that many developers get wrong, in my opinion–Steam Next festival, you just launch a demo on that date and that’s it. Then everyone is surprised that only a couple of hundred people play the game. We got a lot of hype going for these three games going into Steam Next. Level Zero has been hovering in the top one, two, and three positions depending on the day. Duckside has been consistently in the top five. Drill Core is a very small game in comparison, a single-player game, but it’s been in the top 15 very consistently.

GamesBeat: What is internal here in terms of development, versus third-party or external development? What’s your mix like now?

Nichiporchik: Level Zero is the only external one here. It’s developed with our partners at Doghowl Games, most of which are still in Kiev, Ukraine. We have been working with them for about three years. About a year ago we decided to reimagine the game. We were finally able to meet in person and have a few beers and discuss how the game was going. It was more like Evolve, an asymmetrical–not really an extraction game. Just an asymmetrical horror title. When we added the extraction element, the progression in guns, we were really happy.

The other two are internal studios. Duckside is developed by our studio in Riga. They did Hello Engineer for Stadia. You may have heard about that. Drill Core, they did Black Skylands, another indie title with them a couple of years ago. Overall, about half of our development is now internal, and the other half is external.

GamesBeat: How do you communicate this notion of the 1000-hour game to external developers?

Nichiporchik: It takes a lot of time. Most of my daily work now is playing games with our partners. Either internal or external. It’s about playing together, exploring different avenues, and setting guidelines and best practices. It takes a lot of soft skills to communicate this in a way that makes sense. Quite often teams will have different positions that may need to evolve with these kinds of systems-driven approaches.

Game development is unpredictable as it is already. A lot of the time people will gravitate towards more controlled environments within games. The player does this, you take control of the camera, there’s a cutscene, you go into the story element. We have none of that. Everything needs to be delivered through environmental storytelling. You can have lots of bits and pieces of lore scattered around. At its core it needs to be systems-driven.

If it’s multiplayer, then it’s all about how you make it very high stakes. How do you make it so that people get that rush of adrenaline when they eventually succeed? The biggest challenge in PvP games, too, is that when you lose, how do you make it so you understand why you lost? You don’t blame the game. You learn from why you lost. Then you want to try again. That’s a tricky aspect of it. It takes a lot of discussion, a lot of playtesting, a lot of practical examples, guidelines. That’s why I’ve been so vocal about this aspect of game development for the last year or so.

GamesBeat: You have this feeling of emergence in gameplay. We talked before about–how do you deal with the drama of the moment in games like this, as opposed to more heavily scripted games?

Nichiporchik: To me, the key is that your progression is your skill. Your level is your actual skill. I don’t like it when a game tells you, “You’ve leveled up! Great job!” Well, a number is going up. That was the way 10 or 15 years ago. When Call of Duty emerged with its RPG mechanics, that was a lot of fun and it made a lot of sense. Today I feel like it’s about–I know when I have leveled up. I just made this amazing thing in the game, or did an impossible killshot. I did a 1v5 and I need to lie down because my pulse is spiking. That feeling, when you feel like you’ve achieved something.

The flip side of that is when you almost achieve something, and it’s such a unique story that you want to share it with people, and then try it again. This kind of replayability, that creates a lot of value for players. If a game costs, say, $20, and you spend a full year playing it? Maybe you take some breaks from that game to play the new triple-A release that comes out around Q4. But then you come back to this game. Then you have something. We see this with games that have been out for more than a decade, like Minecraft. People still play that a lot because it’s so unique. It’s a social experience to play in multiplayer.

GamesBeat: People discover what you can do in these games, and then they find things that the developers didn’t think about. They share those on social and they can go viral. I remember when you could pick up a helicopter in Call of Duty and chop people up with the rotors.

Nichiporchik: Or jumping out of the jets in Battlefield to make an amazing shot with an RPG. These things are iconic. Level Zero just had a phenomenal moment a couple of days ago. We didn’t plan for this. In Level Zero, it starts off with 12 people playing as mercenaries in teams of three or four. Then there are two monsters running around the map. The monsters hunt everyone while the mercs compete for loot. The mercs, however, don’t respawn. When you die, you can respawn as a drone and be a support unit that helps a bit. But by the end, there’s usually a couple of mercenary players, and still the two monsters.

By that point the monsters are quite strong, because they level up over the session, much like in Evolve. We learned that when you have a couple of solo players left in a match by the end, they’ll often team up. In most games, when people go up to each other and say “I’m friendly,” then they kill each other. Here, people say, “I’m friendly. There are only two of us left, and two monsters. We have a better chance of both winning if we play together.” And this happens more often than you would think. Players organically team up and add each other as Steam friends, and then they actually play together.

We didn’t expect this. It’s completely emergent, and a lot of fun, when you can actually make friends in a game. Usually session-based games don’t facilitate these kinds of systems. It only happens in open world games like DayZ.

GamesBeat: Shifting to the larger industry as well, we’ve had a lot of layoffs overall. You guys have had layoffs. Do you think these kinds of games can lead to a better future for developers, for everyone concerned? Does a longer lifetime for games fix some of the problems we’ve run into?

Nichiporchik: It gives an alternative approach to game development. When you test early, when you verify your vision, you can estimate how many players you’ll have at launch. It’s not just about the marketing. It’s about giving players a way to feel the game, to touch it, to decide for themselves if they want to play it when it comes out.

The other aspect here that we’ve learned over the past six months, which have been extremely difficult for us, is the benefit of internal studios sharing technology. I mentioned in the beginning about Deadside, our survival game by Bad Pixel that we acquired a couple of years ago. Duckside has been developed in six months. We started in December. Now it’s one of our top wishlisted games. That’s because we were able to share internal technology and get the game up very fast. It made a lot of sense when it started to work. Obviously a lot of aspects of it are still janky, and we’ll polish that out, but the core loop we were able to check. Now we know it’ll find an audience.

The biggest risk in our industry, especially when you’re developing a new IP, is when you spend years before a reveal, before even testing on an actual audience. Seeing if it’s going to get traction. This drives the budgets down. It drives the iteration cycles much closer. You can iterate much faster. When we started we were just a couple of guys making a game in a year. When you have hundreds of people working for several years in the hopes that it will hit, that’s a scary proposition.

As an industry, we should move away from that a bit into more experimentation and data verification. You can only do so many surveys and whatnot with traditional marketing. Say I was to make a survey that said, “Hey, do you want a game about ducks killing each other in an open world?” Some people would say yes just for the meme, but market research would probably end up telling you no.

GamesBeat: Are you still in the hundreds of employees? Can you continue expanding to tackle these types of games?

Nichiporchik: We’ve gone to slightly more optimized team sizes. We’ve noticed that smaller teams work much faster, especially after the hiring boom we had over the COVID era. A lot of teams, when they grow, there’s usually a really creative talent there that spends most of their time on calls just talking, instead of designing and developing and doing the actual work. People who have moved from administrative, management roles back into the action are much happier now.

I don’t want to get into that trap again. Hey, everyone’s hiring, so let’s hire too. The salaries go up. It creates an administrative mess. It’s about having a tight team with passionate people, so that everyone on the team understands every aspect of the project.

GamesBeat: You had a viral success with Kingmakers. Was it just the trailer, or was there a demo too? Can you talk about that?

Nichiporchik: With Kingmakers, this is one of those exceptional projects. It’s the complete opposite of what I just said. We revealed it earlier this year with a trailer. If you read the comments, everyone said, “Yeah, the 7-year-old me would have wanted to design this.” But the reason it’s different, the technology behind it took more than four years to develop. Imagine an RTS battle in a large-scale strategy game, but you’re in it, in third person, with a machine gun. But it’s medieval England.

That idea, the way we’ve framed it and revealed it, went viral. The super massive shot happens in the 23rd second of the trailer. We were hoping that people would say, “Hey, watch this to the end.” When everyone is encouraging everyone else to watch your video to the end, it goes viral because of retention. It was everywhere. While we didn’t do a demo or a playtest, we showed a lot of the tech behind it. It’s a complete exception to the rule. Kingmakers is going to be pretty big. But that’s because the moment we saw the early builds–okay, thousands of people on screen and I have a machine gun. That concept. Going back in time with a machine gun.

Now it’s about how we make the core loop deliver on that premise. How do we retain the players for hundreds of hours? It’s an interesting challenge for sure, but the team behind it, they made Road Redemption before. The Road Rash reimagining. I’m confident in their technical ability. Playtest news is coming soon.

GamesBeat: Was that always a big team?

Nichiporchik: Kingmakers is a very small team, actually. They’re led by the Fisch brothers, Paul and Ian. They’re the creative geniuses behind this whole thing. A small team, extremely smart, extremely talented.

GamesBeat: For something like that, are you able to put more people on it now because it showed so well?

Nichiporchik: Right. It makes sense to invest sensibly in something that’s showing traction. You also need to be mindful about the core talent being focused on what they’re good at. I’ve seen too many examples in recent years when great creative people get distracted by administrative issues. We’re all human. We all have bad days and good days. That’s something creative people should not be worried about. You need to build an infrastructure where you have support for those operational challenges.

GamesBeat: A game like this, conceivably you could just start with this great concept and try hard to make the concept happen, to make it playable. But then the question of making it into something you can play for 1000 hours–is that the way this one is unfolding? Was there some thought given to the 1000-hour idea as the game was conceived?

Nichiporchik: The conception part of the game was more about the technology challenge first and foremost. Rendering so many units at a high frame rate with many different animations playing so everything feels organic. That was step number one. When we partnered with the dev team behind it, that’s when we started thinking about what the final game could look like. What’s the structure? How do you make this replayable? That’s going to be a big marketing thing we’ll do later this year. What’s the core game loop?

But the verification part of it was–first off, are people going to dig the concept? Will they appreciate the technology? How will people react to the blend of RTS and third-person shooter mechanics? We’ve verified all of those. We have the answers. How to make it replayable for 1000 hours–that’s the big question that I believe we have an answer for, but we’ll need to verify that before we make any announcements. I could come out and start marketing it as the greatest game in the world, but we need to verify. That’s the core issue of the industry. When you overpromise and you don’t deliver – when you say it’s a gameplay trailer and it’s actually CGI – I feel like players have gotten suspicious of game reveals that promise a lot.

GamesBeat: That brings up this notion of the 1000-hour game as a new way of describing games as a service. Some of the hardcore gaming crowd has become suspicious of games as a service. They see it as a way to just extract more money. How do you address that concern?

Nichiporchik: The way I look at it–you see a new free-to-play triple-A game and think, “Where’s the catch?” Where’s the paywall? When am I going to hit it? That friction between the player and the game’s monetization design isn’t a healthy relationship. Games need to be upfront about what you’re getting for the price of admission, if the game is paid. The additional monetization needs to be not from a block, but from an opportunity for the player.

For me, a lot of the time in games–I’ll say, “Oh, that’s a cool skin. I can take that skin from another player as loot, but I can’t wear it or craft it. Now I want to explore buying that skin.” Then I’ll go to the Steam marketplace or the DLC and so on. Or in Deadside, for example, we have a strong attach rate to our supporter pack DLC. It gives you a couple of items that help you out in the beginning. They’re not pay-to-win. It’s more of a convenience thing. But it also helps players who don’t have the time to play every day. It gives them more storage in the locker box in the safe zone. That allows them to progress at their own pace without worrying about their loot being stolen before they log back in a couple of days later.

To me it’s about the convenience part. It’s about players not being suspicious, like you said. New season, what can I do for free? What can I do for money? I’m not sure. What if my friends buy something and I can’t join them because of the paywall? I don’t like that approach. I like the approach of complete transparency with players about what they get. And I’m one of those players who likes to show off their skins in games.

GamesBeat: When you look back at past games, what do you see as other 1000-hour games? I don’t know if Hello Neighbor, as a series, would qualify that way.

Nichiporchik: It actually would. With Hello Neighbor, we had the original game, and that’s still extremely popular because of the mod kit we provided with the game. People spend a lot of time within the mod kit both creating their own mods and playing other people’s mods, playing around in the original sandbox. Also, one of the spin-offs of Hello Neighbor was Secret Neighbor. It’s like the old game of Werewolf, where one of the players is a traitor in disguise. The gameplay is very social. It’s all about voice chat. That feeling when you have to lie to another player even if they’re probably your friend–no, I’m not the traitor! What do you mean? That dynamic is so strong. We have players who spend thousands of hours with it.

The very first 1000-hour game we had was the first game we published, SpeedRunners. If you go to Steam and look at the top reviews of the game, you’ll see people who say, “Oh, yeah, it’s an okay game. I’ve played about 9000 hours.” That’s more than an okay game. People still play it, especially on consoles. The game has had no updates for close to four years, no meaningful updates. That means the core loop, the core gameplay, is so enchanting that players still love it.

Another example is Streets of Rogue. We have a sequel coming out in August. It’s a single-player and co-op game, procedurally generated. It’s a roguelike with a lot of systems in it where players create very unpredictable scenarios. We have players that go really in-depth in their user reviews. You see people who’ve spent 4000 hours. They’re engaged.

GamesBeat: Outside of your company, what examples come to mind?

Nichiporchik: It’s all about the open world survival games. I mentioned Rust. I mentioned DayZ. Hurtworld has been really good. A game called Scum has done quite well. I’m excited about the upcoming Demon Awakening game. I see that designers find it difficult to balance fair gameplay with a situation where a user’s progression is their skill. In games like this, when you’re doing a tech tree in an open world game–you build a huge base. You tech up. That’s good. It’s a fun 100 or 200 hours. But then when there’s a major update and all the servers reset and wipe, you go through the same progression again. That’s where the players fall off.

How do you make that progression very non-linear and unpredictable? How do you create these snowball effects? Going from zero to hero. Those are the most exhilarating experiences. You probably saw that movie Taken, which is sort of a power fantasy for middle-aged men. A lot of the influencers in the games I mentioned, they create power fantasies. You go into a game like this and you get destroyed. You go cry in the corner. But then you go and watch a power fantasy about what could have happened. It didn’t happen for you, but you watch that video, you get your strength back, and you try again.

I also say that there’s a lot of emergence in recent releases like Gray Zone Warfare or Dark and Darker. They take a more controlled approach to this emergent gameplay with session-based multiplayer. Then they expand that into emergent gameplay with very unpredictable situations. Their PvP is the attraction. In World of Warcraft, if you’re level one and you go against a high-level player, the odds are stacked against you. You’re probably not going to prevail there. But here, you realize that if you’re good enough, if you’re a bit lucky, you can get all the loot. You can take all of that progression. And you can also lose it in that same session.

The most important thing, just to wrap up, is to respect players. When we have game design discussions, we think about how we ease players into this. How do we make the onboarding a bit soft? As long as the UI is good, as long as what’s happening is clear and the players are engaged, the community will have your back. This is what happened with Duckside. There are now different websites with wikis on how to do progression and tutorial videos. If you respect the players enough and trust them to understand what you’re trying to do, you’ll have a relationship of mutual respect with your player base. That will help you in the long run.

GamesBeat: I think about a game like Red Dead Redemption 2. It has 105 missions. They’ve turned this into a longer game, but for someone like me, I do those 105 missions. Maybe it takes me 50 hours or 100 hours, and it’s a good chunk of time, but once I’m done with those, it’s over. How do you take something like that and then make it into a 1000-hour game?

Nichiporchik: The obvious example is GTA Online. You do the missions in GTA V, get acquainted with the game mechanics, and then you go and play GTA Online. That’s arguably the most profitable game in the world. Players just continue playing it.

GamesBeat: Could there have been any other way besides starting up an entire giant MMO? That’s one solution, but maybe not always a practical one.

Nichiporchik: If you look at GTA Online, before it officially became GTA Online, there was an underground community called GTA SA MP, San Andreas Multiplayer, which is where a lot of GTA Online came from. Looking toward the modding community and figuring out what they want to do–I mentioned our Hello Neighbor mod kit, which keeps that game alive. That’s a way to go. If you don’t have the resources to make an MMO – obviously not everyone does – why not focus on the mod kit for your game? Let the players spend their time helping you create content. Maybe they can become game designers someday.

Some of the biggest games of the last couple of decades were based on mods. Left 4 Dead. GTA Online at least took inspiration from a mod. If you look at battle royale, a more recent example, PUBG was a famous mod from the DayZ and Arma community.

GamesBeat: It’s no surprise that Rockstar bought a couple of modding projects.

Nichiporchik: Or look at Roblox. It’s one of those platforms where, now that they’re public, everyone just says, “Wow.” Many companies are trying to get into that development scene, but they don’t succeed. It’s about being in tune with the community. Some of those creators are in their late teens, early 20s, making a lot of money. On the surface you look at their games and think, “That’s easy. I could do that.” But then you try it and no one plays. It’s a whole different ecosystem. The creator community, the modding community, in this new post-triple-A bubble economy that’s where a lot of the new hits will come from.