Why did HyperScape completely fail?

[Maple]

On the surface it seems like this game was poised for massive success. It's fast and fluid, great mobility, graphics are nice, cool cyberpunk style setting, weapon skins, dances, tons of customization, very polished and stable, free to play, etc.

Yet it seems to have completely fizzled out. There are only 8 people streaming it right now on Twitch with 55 total viewers.

What happened? It seems like this title had everything needed to become a big hit and it checked every single box, yet the servers are a ghost town and no one seems to be playing anymore.

Edit - Since people apparently haven't heard of it, this was Ubisoft's big competitor to Apex, Fortnite, and other BR games.

 

[Kingpin Rogers]

I've literally never heard of it.

 

[Combichristoffersen]

I've literally never heard of it.

Click to shrink...

Same. I've never heard about this game before. Will have to google.

 

[JCADX]

Too many battle royales

 

[Dest]

As with the MOBA genre, it doesn't matter how good your game was, if it wasn't already a standing giant you had a very, very slim chance of actually gaining any footing in the market. Also, people stick with what they're comfortable with. Why go play Hyperscape when me and my friends have put hundreds of hours into PUBG or Fortnite or Warzone or Apex

 

[ILikeFeet]

I can't really answer that. my first impression upon reveal was "yet another BR?", but it's not like new BRs can't succeed. and then I heard it was similar to Quake, so maybe the high skill ceiling?

 

[FormatCompatible]

It really does seem like it came and went very quickly.

 

[Deleted member 5129]

It was too difficult for me personally, but I am surprised why no one really seems to have picked it up. Not even the arena shooter (quake etc.) kind of crowd the gameplay was clearly aimed at.

 

[Brrandon]

Feels like once they stopped paying streamers to promote it, it didnt do anything special enough to stand out so everyone quickly forgot about it.

 

[I KILL PXLS]

It's another FPS battle royale that isn't doing enough different to set itself apart from the competition and some pretty dull character design. Even with huge backing, it's not surprising it isn't standing out.

 

[Raigor]

The game failed because it didn't bring anything new in the genre, simple as that.

 

[Stoney Mason]

Too many battle royales

Click to shrink...

This.

I know some people who really liked it when it came out but that market is just tough to crack at this point because it has genre kings and its over-satured.

Personally I like spellbreak. I think its innovative and unique but that also struggles to carve out any mindshare.

 

[sir_crocodile]

was wondering why I'd never heard of it

ah

 

[Professor RAWR]

Wait really? 8 viewers? 8?!?!?!?

Battlefield 3 had more viewers than that last night! LOL!

I remember on day 1 , literally most players had "TTV" on their gamer tag. It was so annoying and even asked myself "i bet most here think they will make it big but streaming this game is already a bad way to start".

 

[Trey]

Extremely saturated genre is the largest reason, but I think Seagull broke it down really well in saying the skill gap was so huge in the game that casual players had absolutely no chance against people better than them on the server. Pubstomping happens is all competitive games, but in HyperSpace the gradient was so large that new and learning players wouldn't even begin to have fun with the game and find a feedback loop that would incentivize them sticking around to get better. They would just get killed over and over again without even understanding why, so why bother?

 

[Tyrant Rave]

Simplest answer is probably: it wasn't very good

I played the beta or whatever last year and it was a bit of a mess, and I never returned. There's a lot of great multiplayer shooters out there, and especially in the BR space it's hard to get a footing. You have to come out of the gate really good like Apex or Warzone to survive.

 

[Slick Butter]

Oversaturated genre right now and I imagine many people didn't appreciate the difficulty relative to other BRs. You have to really secure your win in it, you can't really just win almost by accident like in many other BRs. And you can't rely on the storm /ring/whatever to get rid of people.

It's a great game though.

 

[Serpens007]

I liked it and played for a while and then stopped. The game lacks something, and I really can't put my finger on what it is that feels so "meh" at the end of the day. Like its parts are better than the whole package.

 

[PandemicOdin]

The easy answer? It was complicated... I watched it, played a little. Didn't quite understand it since the game had its own language but more importantly it is less fun than Warzone lol.

 

[The Real Napsta]

I tried it when it came out and from a gameplay standpoint I liked it more than most BRs. I just didnt know anyone that played it and went back to Halo.

 

[Stoney Mason]

Simplest answer is probably: it wasn't very good

I played the beta or whatever last year and it was a bit of a mess, and I never returned. There's a lot of great multiplayer shooters out there, and especially in the BR space it's hard to get a footing. You have to come out of the gate really good like Apex or Warzone to survive.

Click to shrink...

I mean that's really variable. It was arguably a quality experience imo. Sometimes things fail not because of quality but simply because they don't attract a large enough portion of what the current audience in that genre is looking for. It was not bad the way a lot of sub-par games are bad in execution.

 

[Uzupedro]

was wondering why I'd never heard of it

ah

Click to shrink...

😬

 

[Nintendo]

It came out when Warzone was still fresh and everybody was playing it.

Also the balance was terrible at launch. It just wasn't fun. And it only had 3-man squads.

The game is still receiving new content though so I assume people still play it.

 

[KarmaCow]

I only watched a couple matches and it always seemed to devolve into a protracted fight at the end with people jumping around and hiding to recover health.

 

[Serpens007]

The game failed because it didn't bring anything new in the genre, simple as that.

Click to shrink...

I think it actually was very fresh in it's settings, mechanics, speed, verticality, etc. It did bring a lot of stuff into the table but nothing was superb enough to make it stand out.

Like Apex Legends had a lot of good stuff and the Trios + Respawning was fresh, AND also very well executed. I actually chuckle everytime I think that team play AND respawning was something fresh for a multiplayer game in 2019. But it really was the execution that gave Apex the saying power HyperScape didn't achieve.

 

[SteveWinwood]

ive apparently watched about an hour of this game and i have no memory of it whatsoever and forgot what it even was until this very moment

 

[Brazil]

Bad game that felt bad to play from minute 1. Everything about it felt and sounded off.

Really tough proposition when you have at least half a dozen other battle royales out there that have near-flawless execution of their own concepts.

 

[TheDanimal]

It's just… extremely bland. The whole map kinda looked the same, from what I remembered of it. Apex just seemed way better when I first tried hyperscape.

 

[AAION]

I have to imagine it's for the same reasons apex abandoned the mobility of titanfall, as put here by one of the devs:

 

[Hazz3r]

Time to Kill was way too high compared to the mobility. There were too many systems to figure out.

 

[Lord Fanny]

It didn't fail. It's just waiting

 

[Cupcake Knight]

It was boring. But this is every Battle Royal for me.

 

[Jawmuncher]

It wasn't very fun, was also really weird. Like kudos to them for doing something different, but there wasn't much there to keep interest.

 

[Tyrant Rave]

I mean that's really variable. It was arguably a quality experience imo. Sometimes things fail not because of quality but simply because they don't attract a large enough portion of what the current audience in that genre is looking for. It was not bad the way a lot of sub-par games are bad in execution.

Click to shrink...

We're gonna have to disagree. The world itself seemed pretty cool aesthetically and I think the whole after death system was kind of interesting, but everything else felt all over. Shooting felt off, balancing was extremely poor, and so on. It was very, very rough at the time and did a very poor job at making its mechanics and systems feel compelling.

 

[janusff]

The game sucked. Shooting felt like ass, which is a pretty important part of the fps you're making

 

[Palette Swap]

I thought this was going to be about a SNES peripheral or something. Never heard of it.

 

[Stoney Mason]

I have to imagine it's for the same reasons apex abandoned the mobility of titanfall, as put here by one of the devs:

Click to shrink...

This is a good example. Arguably Titanfall 2 failed as a multiplayer over the long haul. (Despite the recent resurgence) Did it fail because it sucked or because at that time it simply wasn't what a large enough portion of the community who was playing shooters wanted at that time?

Especially relevant in light of how Apex which is a toned down version of titanfall with characters was able to succeed.

 

[Alienous]

It soft-launched with an invite only beta and launched on consoles some time after launching on PC.

The larger reason why it failed is (at least it seems like) Ubisoft didn't mind if it failed. It seemed sort of like Ubisoft was just testing the waters, and it wasn't planned as their big entry into the Battle Royale market.

 

[Stoney Mason]

We're gonna have to disagree. The world itself seemed pretty cool aesthetically and I think the whole after death system was kind of interesting, but everything else felt all over. Shooting felt off, balancing was extremely poor, and so on. It was very, very rough at the time and did a very poor job at making its mechanics and systems feel compelling.

Click to shrink...

That's perfectly fine. I'm not saying I'm categorically right either although I disagree with the it sucked crowd. I've played plenty of sucky br's.

 

[Gestault]

I really disliked playing it. Something as basic as "opening doors is obnoxious because of the way you have to juggle weapons to not waste ammo" made VERY clear to me this was a project that was just going through the motions. Controller aiming was a mess, and just felt wrong. I kept re-trying it to see if it improved, and was repeatedly disappointed. Playing on PC wasn't any more engaging. I honestly think the entire size of the level details relative to players wasn't even good for engaging encounters. It had pointless systems slathered on instead of thoughtful design, and worst of all in the end, it's boring.

I think it's trash, and I pity any developers who felt/feel stuck working on it. This was a bad game that failed for good reasons.

 

[TheChungusAmongUs]

It was a BR that was using arena shooter mechanics.

Not exactly the most inviting BR for newcommers, also it launched quietly into a market already dominated by 3 huge BRs (Fortnite, Apex, Warzone)

 

[Serpens007]

Time to Kill was way too high compared to the mobility. There were too many systems to figure out.

Click to shrink...

Probably this, together with the long Apex dev post, as a whole the game just wasn't satisfying enough

 

[DanteMenethil]

Arena FPS movement is exhausting for most people. Same reason why Titanfall 2 never can keep its userbase long term although it spikes every sales.

 

[Dis]

I don't know much about this game honestly, but I heard it was a BR and I already dislike those so didn't bother to check it out. But I will say that publishers seem to never learn with this shit. It was the same with MMOs and every publisher under the sun chasing the WoW money and failing, same with everyone chasing the CoD money in the ps3 and 360 generation and so many games failing, same with everyone trying trying make a MOBA and failing. At some point I honestly question why these companies execs have the jobs they do when a fair number seemingly can't understand the basic idea that "if a game already exists with huge numbers of players and isn't a dumpster fire in terms of quality then why would said players leave the game they enjoy, play and have invested time and money in for who knows how long to go play a new game from scratch".

Of course there are exceptions to that idea but for the most part once a game is a giant in the genre it isn't likely others can come and take the crown. Now that would be fine if publishers were OK with smaller ambition to their attempts to get into a genre but as we have seen many times, publishers aren't happy with a decent profit and return for games and instead want all the profit and money. If a game doesn't get vastly more than it cost to make or run then they aren't interested long term.

Players have seen games cut short so often over the years due to publishers not being happy with smaller profit instead of the huge profits that once a game is shown to not be a giant, it's hard to convince new players to jump in without fear of an abrupt end of life to the game. Then it becomes a snowball effect of not enough new players causing profits to dry up faster and the actual end of life happening.

 

[petethepanda]

On top of the genre being oversaturated, I'm just not sure people are looking for arena shooter style movement right now.

 

[The Lord of Cereal]

I feel like the marketing of the game was the biggest fault tbh. I have it on PC and meant to play it, but then I just completely forgot about it if I'm gonna be honest, and just decided to say screw it and deleted it. No Steam release, an over hyped launch and yet also a lack of marketing on top of being in an over saturated market means this game was pretty much doomed to fail. Not even mentioning the apparently high skill ceiling and being a fast paced game that doesn't really play well on controllers (to me at least)

Apex was successful because even though it didn't have a Steam release, it wasn't over hyped and was just shadow dropped out of nowhere and was also a casual enough game to where anyone could pick it up and enjoy it. When it launched, everyone instantly wanted to try it out and play the new game, and it was also something where even people who are mediocre can enjoy it and do good. From what I remember about Hyperscape is that the marketing cycle was huge and the game was only mediocre on top of the high skill ceiling to where people just didn't enjoy it enough to stick with it.

 

[M. Wallace]

It wasn't fun.

 

[demondance]

It was too difficult for me personally, but I am surprised why no one really seems to have picked it up. Not even the arena shooter (quake etc.) kind of crowd the gameplay was clearly aimed at.

Click to shrink...

That crowd didn't even pick up the actual new Quake game, so...

 

[RF Switch]

My usual gaming group have been playing Warzone, Apex and Pubg and when we tried this we all felt it was boring and bland. It may be different now but when this game hit you had to have something special to get people off warzone. Now is a time to strike for any potential upcoming BR

 

[Remark]

This is a good example. Arguably Titanfall 2 failed as a multiplayer over the long haul. (Despite the recent resurgence) Did it fail because it sucked or because at that time it simply wasn't what a large enough portion of the community who was playing shooters wanted at that time?

Especially relevant in light of how Apex which is a toned down version of titanfall with characters was able to succeed.

Click to shrink...

TF2 failed because it came out at the worst time and the MP wasn't as good as TF1.

That's just fax