The video game Dispatch, a satirical superhero comedy adventure developed by AdHoc Studio, has achieved remarkable commercial success shortly after its launch, positioning it to surpass its ambitious three-year sales target in merely three months. Founded six years ago by a team of former Telltale Games veterans, AdHoc Studio drew on lessons from Telltale’s 2018 collapse to create Dispatch, their debut title, which features high-profile voice talent including Aaron Paul, Jeffrey Wright, and Laura Bailey from Critical Role. The game’s development was marked by significant hurdles, including investor skepticism toward narrative-driven games, with several partners pulling out mid-pitch due to doubts about the genre’s viability following past failures like Telltale’s titles. However, a pivotal partnership with Critical Role—a media company specializing in tabletop role-playing—provided essential funding and creative alignment, enabling the project to proceed with a focus on authentic, human-crafted storytelling that explicitly rejects AI as a “production solution” rather than a creative one, as emphasized by the developers.
Dispatch’s sales trajectory has exceeded even the studio’s most optimistic “bull case” projections, with at least one million copies sold to date, driven by a bold weekly episodic release model that mimics a network TV schedule. Launched with a double bill of episodes and followed by roughly 10 total installments released weekly—the final two dropping on November 12, 2025—the game bucked conventional Steam trends of post-launch player drops. Initial concurrent players hovered around 12,000 on Steam, but this surged to an all-time peak of 220,060 five days ago following the finale, according to SteamDB data, with a 24-hour peak of 49,267 and current players at 18,481 amid a sharp post-peak decline from the mid-November high fueled by word-of-mouth, streamer endorsements, and escalating media buzz. Executive producer Michael Choung expressed surprise at the velocity, stating, “We were confident that people would like it. I think the degree to which it would be successful is something that I certainly didn’t anticipate,” while crediting the episodic format’s proven efficacy from 70 years of television history over internal debates that initially questioned the weekly rollout’s wisdom.
Source: gamesindustry.biz
