Parallel World Game Developer

Chapter 23: Chapter #23: False Expectation

"I don’t know what kind of backroom deal they worked out, but this is absolutely insane!" Silver practically yelled, completely unable to suppress his excitement.

He never would have imagined that the tiny indie studio he accidentally helped put on the map would end up securing this kind of royal treatment from Steam.

Almost instantly, the gaming industry’s massive ecosystem of news aggregators, journalists, and clickbait YouTubers caught the scent. Like blood in the water, the headlines started flooding social media feeds within the hour.

[The First Indie to Get a Global Front-Page Steam Promo in a Decade!]

[Sprout Studio: The Biggest Dark Horse in Gaming History?]

[Steam Insider Leaks: The Sprout Partnership is Unprecedented!]

[Nexus Drops Trailer for New Shooter—Who Takes GOTY?!]

Nexus moved with terrifying corporate efficiency. Because their internal marketing machinery was so vast and deeply established, the moment Daniel Fenn gave the order, their promotional blitz blanketed the internet.

Steam had given Sprout Studio a massive pop-up banner, but it only lasted for the first few seconds a user logged into the client. The curious players clicked through to investigate, while the uninterested simply closed the window.

Nexus, on the other hand, brute-forced their way into the public eye. They bought out unskippable ad rolls, plastered massive cover art across their own storefront, and sponsored dozens of prominent streamers.

"Tsk. Just look at the release date for their new game. It’s the exact same day as Sprout Studio’s drop," Silver said, staring at the flashy promotional banner for Nexus’s upcoming title. He felt a profound sense of speechlessness.

In the gaming industry, major releases actively staggered their launch windows to avoid cannibalizing each other’s sales. Head-on collisions were incredibly rare and usually purely accidental.

But this? Nexus was doing this completely on purpose.

[voidwalker_gg: maybe it’s just a coincidence? Nexus is a massive corp, they don’t need to snipe a two-man indie team]

[CriticalHit88: Nexus didn’t even know Nova was making a war game before the Steam promo dropped]

[MooseTracks47: honestly it’s probably just a scheduling overlap guys]

A few naive viewers in the chat tried to rationalize it as an accident. But the veteran gamers knew better.

Usually, it was the small, desperate indie devs who tried to piggyback off the release hype of a massive AAA studio. But Nexus was a mega-corporation with its own proprietary digital storefront. Why would they actively try to run over a tiny indie studio like a freight train?

Looking at Nexus’s promotional trailer, the genre was painfully obvious. It was a high-octane FPS shooter. The footage was two minutes of non-stop, adrenaline-pumping firepower, complete with a blood-red sky, massive explosions, and soldiers raining bullets on enemy lines.

[Salty_Tears: well, the pressure is entirely on Sprout Studio now]

[xXSlayer99Xx: legit question, how does it feel to get targeted by a mega-corp?]

[GamerDad88: it’s probably game over. now we see if Nexus’s shooter can beat Dead Cells’ reputation. Dead Cells is a masterpiece though]

[LoreMaster: Nexus has probably been cooking this shooter for years. they just didn’t expect a dark horse like Nova to show up.]

[PraiseTheSun_99: no way it’s a coincidence. but beating Dead Cells’ hype is gonna be tough.]

Dead Cells was simply too powerful. Its international virality was staggering. Even months after its initial launch, the daily concurrent player count was still growing steadily.

Sitting in his executive office, Ethan Vale didn’t even bat an eye at Nexus’s overwhelming, multi-million-dollar marketing campaign.

"The internet is saying we made a war game and crashed head-first into Nexus," Marcus Shaw laughed, scrolling through Twitter on his phone. "But if they only knew... these two games have absolutely nothing in common."

Before reading Ethan’s design document, Marcus had never imagined a game could interpret war from this perspective.

In This War of Mine, the player didn’t experience the conflict through the sights of an assault rifle. They experienced the raw, suffocating cruelty of war purely through the eyes of terrified civilians. The gameplay loop was entirely built around the desperate struggle to survive.

The characters in the game had to endure crippling psychological trauma, severe depression, and brutal moral dilemmas that could break them at any moment.

This wasn’t a game designed to sing praises about heroic soldiers charging through a hail of bullets. It wasn’t a glorification of the life-and-death brotherhood between comrades in arms.

Was it about freedom? Justice?

Neither.

The sole objective was to survive until the eventual ceasefire. Players had to navigate a deadly, decaying environment with critically scarce resources, leading a small group of civilians huddled together in a bombed-out shelter just trying to see tomorrow.

The launch window rapidly approached without any delays. Sprout Studio held firm to their schedule, completely ignoring the corporate giant breathing down their neck.

Nexus didn’t flinch either, keeping their release time locked to the exact same hour.

A week before launch, Sprout Studio finally dropped a short CG trailer. It was barely fifteen seconds long, but the atmosphere was suffocatingly dense.

The footage showed a dozen heavily armed soldiers exchanging brutal crossfire in a ruined street. Dark, oppressive storm clouds choked the sky overhead, while gray and black gunpowder smoke drifted through the alleyways. The bright yellow muzzle flashes from the rifles were jarringly sharp against the bleak, desaturated environment.

The residential apartment blocks were decaying, their walls spider-webbed with cracks. In the dark corners of the buildings, ragged, starving people huddled together, weeping silently. Severely wounded civilians slumped helplessly against the bullet-riddled brick walls outside.

The deafening roar of gunfire never stopped for the entire fifteen seconds. The sheer bleakness of the trailer left viewers feeling entirely powerless.

There were no genre tags explicitly calling it an ’FPS’ or a ’Shooter’. But the moment players saw the word ’War’ in the title, combined with the chaotic street violence in the trailer, they immediately slapped the ’Shooter’ tag on the Steam page themselves.

In their minds, every single war game they had ever played was a first-person shooter.

July 1st finally arrived. It was a Saturday. At exactly 8:00 PM, both titles officially unlocked on their respective platforms.

Sprout Studio’s game was priced at an incredibly modest $5.99. Nexus’s flagship shooter debuted at $8.99.

While the indie title was noticeably cheaper, the modern gaming market had deeply ingrained a specific bias in players’ minds. A higher price tag usually implied a higher production budget, a longer campaign, and a more polished overall experience.

Silver sat at his desk, his mouse hovering over his Steam library right as the clock struck eight.

"Do you guys really need to ask? I’m obviously buying the sadist’s game first," Silver said, shaking his head.

No matter how much pain the man had caused him, the two titles Nova had produced so far had never disappointed. As for Nexus’s new shooter? Silver had played a hundred generic military FPS games in his life. He felt zero excitement for another one.

[Salty_Tears: if this game is another die-and-restart roguelike, i feel like im gonna get aesthetic fatigue real quick]

[voidwalker_gg: yeah it’s fun once or twice, but doing the same loop for a third game is gonna be exhausting]

[xXSlayer99Xx: i agree but Nova is a genius. he has his own unique grip on game design. i complained about Dead Cells but i still want to play it for another 100 hours]

[GamerDad88: if he can pull out some completely new mechanics this time, it’ll be a massive W]

Silver watched the chat scroll by. He entirely agreed. Reusing the same punishing reset mechanic would inevitably burn out the player base. But it was also an undeniable fact that the sadist dev had already conquered that exact problem once before.

Nova was the first designer on Terra to figure out how to keep players completely engaged while doing the exact same thing over and over.

Silver quickly finalized his purchase and booted up the executable.

When the game loaded in, he braced himself. He expected to see a pair of disembodied hands gripping an assault rifle, or an over-the-shoulder camera locking onto a soldier’s back.

Instead, the screen revealed a charcoal-drawn landscape. Charred, skeletal trees framed a background filled with thick black smoke and low, artillery-shattered apartment buildings.

Inside a cross-section of a ruined house stood a few ordinary people. They were completely unarmed, wearing civilian clothes, and carrying absolutely zero military gear.

This wasn’t an FPS. It was entirely different from any war game Silver had ever seen in his life.

’It’s a 2D side-scroller?’ Silver thought, his eyes widening.

— — — — —

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