The Next Lightning in a Bottle
In 2020, I wrote about the indie studio Drodo that invented a new game (mod) called Auto Chess. Auto Chess went viral: within months, millions were playing and streaming the game. Auto Chess was replicated by practically every major studio, mostly notably by Riot Games as Team Fight Tactics.
In gaming, few instances of gameplay innovation result in such “lightning-in-a-bottle” moments: most gameplay innovations tend to be incremental rather than transformative. Yet those few “lightning-in-a-bottle” moments lead to life-changing rewards for those who can capture them: from Counter Strike (originally a Half Life mod), to League of Legends (originally Dota of Warcraft III), to Fortnite (originally an Arma II mod and then PUBG), to Team Fight Tactics. Since Auto Chess, the industry has been looking for its next “lightning in a bottle” game.
It may have found it with Dark and Darker.
Dark and Darker is a dungeon crawler “extraction” game. Teams of players enter procedurally-generated dungeons in search of loot. Danger comes in the form of both mobs and other players, who may be inclined to kill fellow players for loot rather than do honest work. And so behind every door lurks the danger of not just skeletons and wizards, but also the threat of hostile players. To secure their loot, players need to avoid (or kill) other players and reach extraction points. This design leads to an incredible breadth of emergent gameplay perfectly suited for live streaming.
Dark and Darker is still in development, yet its few early playtests generated such a level of virality that millions are already flocking to its alpha playtests (almost unheard of for an alpha game). Hundreds of YouTube and Twitch videos covering the game have garnered tens of millions of views.
Getting ready for another run of the dungeons
The “extraction” genre of Dark and Darker is not new. Escape from Tarkov—a first-person shooter extraction game—built a cult following as early as 2016 and hit its own moments of virality (Escape from Tarkov topped Twitch charts multiple times). I remember tearing down the game for EA in 2018. The challenge with Tarkov was that it was extremely unforgiving. Death had permanent consequences, and its brutality was compounded by a heavily skill-based genre (FPS). The result was a game design that only a niche group of hypercore players can stand.
While many major publishers saw the potential in Tarkov-like “extraction” games, they could not get past the brutality that made Tarkov difficult to scale for mass audiences. So they sat back and watched with keen interest for the genre to evolve.
The innovation of Dark and Darker was to bring the “extraction” format out of the first-player shooter genre, and into an entirely different one: RPG. While the consequences of player death are no less severe, the hack and slash RPG gameplay reduces the skill ceilings and thus increases the number of players who can enjoy the experience. Instead of the feeling of constant dread in Tarkov (of being sniped at any moment from any corner), the brutality of the extraction genre is reimagined as almost a Dungeons & Dragons campaign with different stories each run. For the average player, it makes the “extraction” genre a little bit more palatable.
In a way, the RPG genre feels like a better home for the extraction genre than first-person shooters. It opens up this highly viral style of play to more mass audiences, and this may be the key to unlocking the next “lightning-in-a-bottle” moment.
Dark and Darker is developed by Ironmace, an otherwise unknown developer out of Korea. Ironmace draws similarities to Blue Hole / Krafton (the developer of PUBG, also out of Korea), and to Drodo (the aforementioned Chinese developer of Auto Chess) in that all three were relatively small studios out of Asia when they captured the “lightning in a bottle”.
By the developers’ own account, the Ironmace team is “lean” with limited funding (of course that would have changed by this point), and more importantly no internal marketing or distribution capabilities. This is a precarious position for the developer to be in.
Over the past decade, major studios have become increasingly Machievellian in replicating “lightning-in-a-bottle” moments at great speed. It took Riot Games and others over four years to replicate Dota in 2009. In 2017, it took Fortnite just a few months to pivot to the Battle Royale game mode of PUBG. In 2019, five major developers (including Riot, Blizzard, and Tencent) copied Auto Chess within months of its virality.
With such compressed timelines to competition, the original developers’ state of readiness when virality hits is crucial. PUBG had already launched when competition came knocking, and was able to claim its market share despite Fortnite’s incursion. Today, Krafton is worth over $7 billion thanks mostly to PUBG. In contrast, Auto Chess was still in early development (as a mod) when virality came, and the team was outcompeted by speedy replicators. Today, Drodo is unfortunately a footnote in gaming history.
Dark and Darker is somewhere in between. The game is in alpha, meaning it's mostly made, but not 100% completed. Massive early virality confirms their vision, but also alerts competition. Too much early success for such a small studio may paradoxically not be a good thing. It is entirely conceivable that other RPG studios have already started to pivot towards Dark and Darker. The next few months will be crucial for Ironmace.
However this story plays out, I find it tremendously exciting that the next “lightning-in-a-bottle” moment could be around the corner. If it is the case, we will study this story for years to come.
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