Why BattleBit Remastered's devs wanted to make a low-spec large-scale shooter

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In an industry like games, one that's always looking forward and eyeing up what the newest and most powerful tech in the world, it's not exactly common for a developer to pitch a project as being able to run on almost anything.

That's exactly what the team behind the indie smash hit BattleBit Remastered has done. The game takes the large-scale battles – up to 256 players – and destruction of a game like Battlefield and reduces the graphical fidelity considerably so that it doesn't explode lower-end PCs.

Ahead of the release, the BattleBit team wasn't expecting anything massive to happen when the game launched on June 15, 2023. But when they started looking into the demand for the title, they were very surprised by what actually came to pass.

"We were very underwhelmed about what we thought would happen," Fink says.

"We knew that people liked the game because, by that point, we had around a million wish lists. We decided to run a final playtest. We did one every Saturday. This final one was 48 hours long and we figured it'd give us a good idea of how many people were still interested in the game. We normally had something like 15,000 players so thought if we hit 20,000 for this final playtest, that would be extremely good. We ended up reaching over 32,000 people. That was slightly different to what we were expecting. But all of the playtests were free. On the release day, release week, we thought we'd have 15,000 people playing concurrently. We thought we would sell around 100,000 copies within the first three days.

"We didn't. We almost reached 90,000 active players. I think 87,000 was our highest peak. And we sold 100,000 copies in just