The open Hull Rupture playtest closed with more than 30,000 participants, an average playtime of 3 hours and 38 minutes and a median of 1 hour and 36 minutes — the best numbers Konfa Games had across all demos and playtests for their previous games, and the reason the game exists in this shape.
The Hull Rupture playtest numbers
- Open playtest: more than 30,000 participants, average playtime 3 hours 38 minutes, median 1 hour 36 minutes.
- Steam Next Fest demo: 25,389 players, average flight time 2 hours 33 minutes, and 93% positive reviews during the festival.
The playtest figures are the headline, and they are also the reason the developers kept working on the systems rather than restructuring the game around them.
The systems the playtest still had
The playtest was an early version, and three of its systems are gone in the launch build:
- Modules could not be repositioned once placed. Hull Construction replaced that.
- The ship grew through a few preset Shipyard layouts. Hull Construction replaced that too, and the hull construction guide covers the rules that took over.
- There was only one 'base' difficulty. The launch build has four difficulty levels, and the higher ones add map encounters that are not part of your 20 waves — the difficulty guide covers what changes above the base tier.
The two problems the developers named
When the playtest closed, the developers named two problems outright rather than shipping past them.
Endless Mode. They said yes, it has problems: it is going to be heavily reworked, not just wave balance but the entire late-game flow, and they had to wipe the leaderboard at one point because some players had evolved from "resourceful survivors" into "min-maxing interstellar tyrants". The endless mode guide covers what that rewrite turned into.
The Bioreactor. Repeatedly stuffing humans into a giant meat furnace should probably require fewer clicks, so Despot's efficiency department started experimenting with quality-of-life improvements and highly unethical automation — which shipped as converter Auto in the September demo update. The Bioreactor guide covers how the automation behaves.
What the playtest promised
They also promised more playable sessions before launch, and stressed that the playtest was still a very early version with a lot of work ahead. The sessions point matters more than it sounds: the playtest's median playtime was under two hours, while the average was nearly four, which is a distribution that says a lot of players bounced off a build that had no late game to speak of.