The Toy Story-like toy soldier game Hypercharge: Unboxed recently launched on PS5 and PS4, and after some players complained about low online-player populations, the game’s small development team wrote back to share its side of the story.
“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,” the developer said on social media. “If that’s all Hypercharge ever is… that’s enough for us. Not every game is meant to be online-only.”
The game’s head of marketing, Joe Henson of Digital Cybercherries, told Polygon that fans becoming frustrated by Hypercharge lacking enough players for a good online experience is understandable. But the game isn’t aimed specifically at online.
“I don’t think it’s fair to call a game a failure when it’s doing exactly what it set out to do: Offer a solid offline and local co-op experience, with online as a nice extra, not the main focus,” Henson said.
Posting on social media, the game’s account added, “We’re not lazy. We’ve worked incredibly hard to bring Hypercharge to every major console, all by ourselves. No publisher. No funding. Just a small team doing everything we can because people asked us to. We did it for the fans. And we’re proud of that.”
Hypercharge was developed by a team of five people, and the developer said, “We don’t need to sell millions of copies. We don’t need millions of players online at once.”
“It will never have in-game microtransactions, battle passes, etc. Will we lose money doing that? Or miss out on millions of players? Maybe. But what we don’t lose is sleep by going against what we believe in.”
Following its debut on Steam in 2020, Hypercharge launched on Xbox in June 2024 and sold more than 50,000 copies in its first six days. The $30 game came to PS4 and PS5 on May 30 and rose to become the No. 6 best-selling game on the PlayStation Store for a period of time, though the developer has not shared a sales number on Sony’s consoles.
