How Dread Hunger found and retained an audience
Simon Carless
Monday 2nd May 2022
The GameDiscoverCo game discovery newsletter is written by 'how people find your game' expert and GameDiscoverCo founder Simon Carless, and is a regular look at how people discover and buy video games in the 2020s.
Some of you may have been surprised to see social deduction game Dread Hunger consistently in the top-grossing Steam games over the past few weeks. But the survival/social deception combination has been a delicious win for the studio behind it, Digital Confectioners, with CCUs as high as 100,000 on the service.
As part of a recent GameDiscoverCo podcast, we chatted to James Tan of Digital Confectioners, one of the key creators of the smash hit multiplayer title. He talked to us about the project's 'hook,' its surprise Chinese success, and post-1.0 path to 1 million units sold (!)
When initially creating the game - which has you playing an explorer, trapped on a ship in the Arctic tundra with your crewmates, some of whom are 'thralls' (the bad guys!), James notes: "When we first started looking at these genres - social deduction and survival - we started by picking out the stronger genre, which was actually survival at the time."
But "sprinkles of misinformation" were always a key part of the game. And James adds: "We really liked those kinds of betrayal moments. They gave players more room for player-generated stories about funny things that would happen. I think it's fair to say that when Among Us really started gaining a lot of traction… [we] pivoted a little bit in the marketing message."
So this means the game's hook is somewhat more layered/complex than just 'find the impostor!': "Maybe in order to survive, there are things that I'm going to need to do that I otherwise normally
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