PS5 shooter goes from 5 players to bestseller after devs defend game

Summary

Hypercharge, a whimsical action figure shooter, just went from near-obscurity to becoming one of the top 10 sellers on PS5 over the weekend, and it’s all thanks to the developers’ honesty. Every day, thousands of new games are released on major storefronts, and the sad reality is that most won’t make it. Live service titles like Fortnite already hoard most of the user base on any given platform. Some games earn well below whatever it took to make them in the first place. And so we arrive at Hypercharge: Unboxed, a third-person shooter where players control action figures, which was ported at the end of May to Xbox and PlayStation.Originally released in 2020 on Steam, Hypercharge arrived on the scene with plenty of fanfare. Footage of the game periodically went viral on social media as onlookers were delighted by the prospect of a game that looked straight out of Pixar’s Toy Story. Steam users have granted Hypercharge a “Very Positive’” rating, with one top review on the platform declaring the experience “pure childhood joy.” Not bad for a game made by a team of 5 people.But that was years ago. In 2025, the shooter landscape is more competitive than ever, which means that success was not assured for Hypercharge. Despite launching with cross-platform support, it seems that interest in the game was minimal at the start of 2025. On Steam, the top-voted review posted on May 12th of this year declared, “Game is dead.”Players on console soon realized this was the case, with at least one player taking to social media to voice their dissatisfaction. This player claimed there weren’t enough players to form a full lobby, and that there were “literally 5 people online.”This prompted developer Digital Cybercherries to respond, and the post was surprisingly earnest. The makers of the action figure game acknowledged that there weren’t many people enjoying the game, but that they were OK with that so long as the game brought someone, somewhere joy.The developers followed up this po...