Japanese developer Hytacka and publisher Kodansha released the new action RPG Rise of Rebellion on April 22 on Steam. A week later, Hytacka says that the ambitious game has had a poor launch both in terms of sales and critical reception. While he intends to remain active as a game developer, he suggests that he is likely to lose the support of his publisher for future projects.
Rise of Rebellion is a single-player 3D action RPG focusing on close-range sword combat. Leading up to its launch, the indie project had been on the radar of many soulslike fans due to its combo system, directional parry and dodge systems, powerful enemies, and the fact that it’s being developed by a former Dark Souls 3 developer. However, a week following launch, Rise of Rebellion has a Mixed rating on Steam, with only 40% out of 119 user reviews being positive.
In an update on his YouTube channel, Hytacka reflects on the game’s performance. He doesn’t disclose specific sales figures, but mentions that using commonly cited review-to-sales ratios (for example, ‘number of reviews x 30 = number of copies sold’) should give you a decent estimate of how many copies Rise of Rebellion has sold so far. Based on this, the game likely sold between 3k and 5k copies – which is indeed low compared to its 40,000+ Wishlists and Hytacka’s target total of 100,000 copies. “The results are not good, or rather – in terms of what my goal was – I would say it bombed completely,” Hytacka comments.
Rise of Rebellion’s development originally started in 2020, but the project went through a complete overhaul in 2023 in response to criticism from early demo players. Despite rebuilding the game from scratch to improve controls and other issues, it seems Hytacka was unfortunately not able to reach a level of polish that would satisfy his target audience. “Like the reviews say, the quality was disappointing,” he reflects in his video. To be fair, though, while Rise of Rebelion has received some harsh criticism from Steam reviewers, specific aspects of it – especially the combat – have been singled out as entertaining and worthwhile, especially given the game’s low price point.
Given Rise of Rebellion’s weak commercial performance so far, Hytacka doesn’t have any big plans for it. Future updates will include only bug fixes and the addition of an (optional) easy mode that does away with directional inputs for parries and slows down the speed of some enemy attack motions.
As for his future as a game developer, Hytacka says he intends to stay active, but that he is likely to lose support from publisher Kodansha, which will significantly slow down the pace he’s able to work at. “Honestly, it’ll probably be a while before I get to a point where I have something to show.” Hytacka acknowledges that his followers are being “extremely reasonable” for advising him to make a smaller game, but that his next project “likely will not follow that advice” as his ambition is still strong.
Rise of Rebellion is available for PC (Steam).
