Meir's Monthly Learning Article

This month I want to highlight an article, Dread Hunger: A Post Mortem, by Alex Quick. Dread Hunger was an indie social deduction game that became a viral hit in the Chinese market. Dread Hunger was created and run by a handful of developers; they were not staffed to appropriately handle the responsibilities that come with a large player base, such as moderation, security, anti-cheat, localization, and community support. The Chinese market players attempted to abuse Dread Hunger like any other AAA game, and the Dread Hunger team was unable to respond in kind, leaving them with few options. Dread Hunger died because it was too successful.

It’s wild to witness massively exceeding expectations causing material harm, yet that is exactly what occurred. In 2023, indie games accounted for 98.7% of games released on Steam¹ (181 AA/AAA vs. 13,790 indie). While nearly all games are indie games, gamers drive the games industry with unrelenting expectations, and AAA games largely meet those expectations with robust feature sets, multi-market support, and hundreds of developers to fire fight and support emergent needs. Dread Hunger serves as a reminder that success begets expectations, and a team must be properly staffed, capable, and experienced to handle the burden of success.

https://medium.com/@alex_31445/dread-hunger-a-post-mortem-441af9ce23

“In late February we started noticing a few issues with our servers. They were dying and restarting seemingly at random. It soon became clear that they were being targeted by DDOS attacks. The attacks intensified throughout March and April to the point where the amount of data being sent at our servers was on the level of what might be directed at a large bank or government website to take it offline.”