When Nuggets Entertainment set out to build RV There Yet? from a game jam project to full release, co-founder and CEO Tim Badylak thought it “might sell 20,000 or so units in a year.” That estimate turned out to be spectacularly conservative: the cooperative recreational vehicle adventure actually sold two million units in eight days.
“It was unreal,” recalls Badylak when GamesIndustry.biz caught up with him after he shared the numbers at Nordic Game. “You just look at the number and go, ‘What happened? Maybe something’s wrong with the back end?'” The sheer number of downloads ended up causing havoc with the game’s bug reporter, which struggled with the unexpected deluge, adds the other Nuggets co-founder, Kristoffer Andersson. “We had to upgrade that.”
Badylak puts the game’s popularity down to a number of reasons. TikTok was a big one – someone found the game’s hidden Steam page ahead of its announcement, and their post made using the game’s unfinished marketing assets went viral. (It should be noted that all of the game’s marketing was organic – the studio didn’t pay for anything.) He also notes that Valve liked the game and helped by giving it a takeover on Steam.
But a big factor was timing. RV There Yet? was inspired by titles like REPO and Lethal Company, and it hit during the height of the friendslop phenomenon, coming just a few months after Peak dominated the bestseller list. “I think it was a good decision of us to do this game now, and we actively had the conversation about ‘This might be irrelevant in a year’,” says Badylak.
He’s also convinced that the tiny window between the game’s reveal and its release was a huge help. “The fact that we released the game on its peak hype cycle, when it actually got viral, that makes us question how we’ve done things before with Satisfactory or Among the Wild, where it’s more like the traditional ‘build your community over time, keep on gathering those wishlists’. Maybe next game, we’re going to have more confidence in that actually if we think it’s cool, we can say, ‘This is coming in a week, prepare your friends’, or whatever. Maybe we can actually give the game when people are excited about it, rather than hyping people and then dragging on for years.”
Time for something different
Badylak was previously CEO of Coffee Stain Publishing, home of games like Satisfactory, Deep Rock Galactic, Valheim, and Goat Simulator, but he left to co-found Nuggets Entertainment with Andersson around six years ago. The studio has been working on the first-person farming game Among the Wild since 2021, and RV There Yet? emerged as a quick side project to alleviate the frustration of interminably toiling on a single game.
“We were completely burned out after those four and a half years,” Badylak told the audience in his talk at Nordic Game. “Five years of thinking of the same project makes you insane… It was years of trying to convince yourself that if we just plough on, commit to the course, this is going to be awesome. But at some point I personally hit a wall and felt like I’d do anything to do something else.”
Badylak said the concept of RV There Yet? quickly gained traction within the studio, and they decided to embrace the excitement around the new game, rather than putting it off until they finished Among the Wild. “I’m very proud of us as a team, that we actually said like, ‘Fuck it, we don’t have to do Among the Wild now, but we actually maybe have to do this game now’.” The momentum was key, he said: the “fire and spark” might have gone if they’d waited what might have been years until the previous project was finished, by which point the gaming landscape might have changed.
RV There Yet? was spun up in a week by four people while the rest of the team was on holiday. “And during that week we kind of nailed the core, and it was already fun.” The RV and the winch system were already in place, along with the smoking. Badylak noted the game was reflective of the desires of the slightly older people making it. “We’re kind of romanticizing smoking cigarettes: we can’t do that anymore. We have kids and mortgages. So just smoking cigarettes and fucking around with your friends is something that you dream about doing when you’re an old person.”
After that initial week’s work, the game took around another eight weeks to finish. Badylak credited the team’s experience as the reason why it came together so quickly: some members of the team have known each other for more than ten years. “And then in this new studio, we worked for at least four and a half years before we started doing this, so we couldn’t have done RV There Yet?, I think, without that bonding, and developing that humour together, and the culture of creativity.”
It’s reminiscent of Toys for Bob emphasising the importance of their team’s collective experience when it comes to making good games – and Badylak was at pains to point out that this kind of speedy development is the end result of many years of work. “I think it’s very important that if anyone else is feeling the pressure of, ‘Oh we should also be able to do something in eight weeks’, I think it takes years to build that type of relationship.”
The need for speed
Another factor that sped development was a commitment to not overthink anything, and instead make rapid yes/no decisions. “If you can’t figure it out in half an hour or something, then it shouldn’t be in the game,” Andersson tells GamesIndustry.biz. “You get a little thinking time,” adds Badylak, “but the yes or no comes very quickly.”
He reckons that the time constraint, knowing they only had a few weeks to work on the title, was key, along with the enthusiasm of the team for the project. “We were newly in love with the idea,” he says, noting that typically during the development of a game, the initial excitement and infatuation morphs into a different kind of passion over months and years. “But throughout the development of RV, it was like the honeymoon phase until release.”
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RV There Yet? launched at $7.99, a similar price to fellow friendslop title Peak from Landfall Games and Aggro Crab – another title that was put together in a matter of weeks. Andersson says that initially they thought about launching the game for free if it “wasn’t good enough,” or maybe $4, but Badylak says they kept upping their intended price point as the team became more confident in the game during development. “Every week we worked on it, we added a dollar value,” he says. “The goal for us was just to release something, even if it’s free. Then it turned out to be pretty fun.”
Nugget’s enthusiam for rapid prototyping and development echoes that of many other developers. Cryptic Studios’ Jack Emmert recently told GamesIndustry.biz that “the cost to figure out whether a game sucks or not is really high,” emphasising the need for the industry to embrace speedier prototyping in an era of shrinking margins. Evil Landfall head Kirsten-Lee Naidoo has also advocates for shorter development cycles: “We all think that that model is better, because it just eliminates so much risk. If you work on a project for six months and it doesn’t end up being anything, you can move on.”
“Throughout the development of RV, it was like the honeymoon phase until release”
Andersson says that it depends on the kind of game you’re making. “If it’s a game like RV, then yeah, maybe. But if it’s a bigger game, like Expedition 33, then you can’t do that.”
Badylak agrees, pointing out that Dwarf Fortress and “so many beautiful games” wouldn’t exist if the developers had rigidly stuck to short development cycles and abandoned projects after six months if they didn’t immediately click. He says there’s no single rule that works for everyone. “I’m not a fan of finding silver bullets.”
Nuggets is blessed with the flexibility and funding that enables it to work on a side project on a whim; that’s not something every developer will have especially if they’re locked in to development milestones with a publisher. The firm is backed by investment from Coffee Stain co-founder Stefan Hanna, and Badylak says one of the reasons the studio didn’t tie itself to a bigger investor was to retain their freedom. They wanted to “keep it local, keep it creative and flexible, [with] someone who understands us, and just be able to do things we think are funny.”
Friendslop future
After that rollercoaster launch, RV There Yet? has followed the trend of most friendslop games: the huge peak of initial engagement was followed by a rapid tail off as players move on to the next title. Badylak is sanguine about it. “People want to try something new that is lighthearted or doesn’t require you to spend 20 hours before it’s fun,” he says. “We decided to do a bespoke world and more of a campaign, rather than a procedural thing. We didn’t focus on replayability at all, we just focused on the roller-coaster ride.”
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Badylak is also of the opinion that not every game needs to be played endlessly. “I do get the sense that people are like, ‘Oh, how’s it going, the CCUs are low?’, and I was like, it’s still higher than we ever expected. And at the same time, I don’t think every game should be a live service or a forever game. And for us, it’s awesome if people have awesome memories.”
“It’s fine if something’s consumable,” adds Andersson.
Badylak agrees: “You have memories, you had that ride with those friends. You’re forever going to have that as a moment, and it’s never going to get watered down.”
Right now, Nuggets is working on the final major update for RV There Yet? before moving on to something else. “I think it became more of a job maybe,” reflects Andersson. “It’s not as fun anymore. It’s still fun. We still have fun making the game, but it’s more of a slog right now.”
“And it goes back to the Goat [Simulator] days,” adds Badylak, referencing Coffee Stain’s 2014 hit. “At some point the DLCs… felt a little bit more like doing it for the money rather than do we have the same creative passion? We’ll see how it goes for us, but we want to try to just keep on to that creative thing that made this happen the first time, rather than facilitating something forever and then losing that.”
“We still have fun making the game, but it’s more of a slog right now”
As for what exactly comes next – whether Nuggets will make another quick game like RV There Yet?, go back to finish Among the Wild, or do something else entirely – that remains up in the air at the moment.
“That’s the soul searching we need to do,” says Badylak. “I think the most important thing for us is to try to see what we are excited about, and it might require some time to play around to find that again. We still think Among the Wild deserves a shot, because we think it’s special still – and some of the alpha players think it’s very special and are like, ‘Why aren’t you finishing this game?’ So I think there is something there, and we have the freedom to be able to do it.
“I think it maybe is just scary from a point of view where we don’t want to dig ourselves down a hole again. Or [maybe] it’s exactly what we should do, so we can get burned out again and then make another game.”
