When The Game is Coming Out

AHhhhhhHHHHhhhhhHHHHHhhhhhh

I work on a videogame called SUPERVIVE that’s coming out this Thursday, July 24. If you follow me on Twitter you are already aware of this, because I have been shilling the game relentlessly. I can’t help myself. I want SUPERVIVE to succeed for a bunch of different reasons, most importantly because it’s super fun and I want to keep working on it for years to come. Of course, my little tweets with their 635 impressions aren’t going to alter the outcome, but this is one of the rare cases where posting feels better than not posting.

I’ve been through a few different major releases at this point in my Narrative Design career, and they’ve all felt like Fig. 1 below:

Fig. 1: Screaming cat

During the lead-up to Overwatch 2 launch, I felt more excitement and anticipation than I’d ever thought possible; also a Star Destroyer-sized portion of anxiety. It was hard to sleep. It was hard to think about anything else. The days leading up to launch passed with grueling sluggishness. I had put so much effort into that game, written probably 14,000 voice lines, spent hundreds of hours helping direct voice sessions, all of my work remote, operating out of a studio apartment during the COVID-19 office shutdown. All I wanted, all I could think about, was a positive outcome for Overwatch 2.

The game came out. It had an enormous and meteoric spike; every gamer in the universe tried it; then a lot of them went away.

That story has a happy ending, but it took a while to get there. Much of the Overwatch team was laid off—by that point I had thankfully already moved on—but the player base seems (from the outside, at least) to have stabilized at a level that is sustainable for the team that remains. It’s a great game, from a great developer with a great reputation; I’m happy that millions of players are still enjoying it, and happy to see my buds over there thriving.

Emotionally, it’s hard to express what a rollercoaster that release was. The game I worked on, which I wanted so desperately to succeed, briefly reached a level of pop culture prominence that exceeded, e.g., the Superman film currently doing the rounds (Fig 2. below lol):

Fig. 2, Google Trends data for Overwatch 2 vs Superman over the past 5 years

That spike was pure euphoria. We had a big launch party in an aircraft hangar, everyone celebrated, and it felt like all the effort was going to be worth it. Then, in the months that followed, the concerning data started rolling in. By the time I left, the mood was pretty dire. And then, like I said, the layoffs and cancellations hit.

So: anticipation, euphoria, anxiety. Those are, as far as I can tell, the emotions of Releasing a Videogame. Or maybe Releasing Anything: I can imagine the eve of an author’s first novel release feels just as intense. Maybe that’s even worse: in this publishing industry, if your first book doesn’t go well, you might have a lot of trouble selling the next one.

This Time Around

Going into SUPERVIVE’s 1.0 launch, I’ve learned a few things. The industry is cutthroat; there are probably, even after all the layoffs and shutdowns, still too many AAA games being released; launching a PvP live service game is particularly brutal right now, maybe the most brutal it’s ever been. Pulling players away from the massive incumbent juggernauts is so hard that basically nobody has succeeded at doing it. To achieve it you’d have to have a game better than 99.9% of its competitors, an absolutely amazing game, and even that might not be enough; you’d also need to get lucky, catch fire, and become the game everybody’s talking about. A game like this has to have scale; it has to be the game of the moment, and then it somehow needs to stay there, not only not fall off, but somehow find a way to grow.

At Theorycraft we take that very seriously. There have been plenty of late nights. We know it isn’t enough to be a great game. We have to be freaking phenomenal.

But to be honest, I think we may have succeeded. I really like SUPERVIVE, and I’m really excited to play it for real, with hundreds of thousands or maybe even millions of real players, when we launch on Thursday. I think it’s good enough that we have a chance. If you have thumbs, a mouse, and a keyboard, I hope you’ll check it out too.¹

In the interminable meantime, I’ll be sitting around, every bone in my skeleton rattling, waiting for July 24, praying that players will feel the same way about our game that we do.

Let’s freaking go!!!!!!

-Justin

1. Thumbs are actually optional. I just like that joke that goes “What has two thumbs and is playing SUPERVIVE on July 24th? This guy!” and I couldn’t figure out how to actually work it in.