A breakout PC success story has left Microsoft and Nintendo’s machines on the sidelines for now. Dispatch exploded out of the gate, moving one million copies in ten days while earning an almost spotless rating on Steam. The overwhelmingly positive response has AdHoc Studio openly weighing additional console versions.

2025 is shaping up to be a watershed for small and mid-sized teams, even as the industry wrestles with crisis and blockbuster budgets. Against that backdrop, plenty of previously unknown outfits have surfaced and staked a claim as leaders in their niches. One of them is AdHoc Studio, a tiny independent crew that weathered a gauntlet of setbacks yet launched so strongly that Dispatch now looks likely to reach Xbox and Nintendo Switch 2 down the line.

Having launched on PC just two weeks ago, Dispatch has already cleared one million sales, cementing itself as one of the year’s standout releases. Coupled with a 97 % positive rating on Steam, that momentum pushed the studio to confirm on Discord that they are open to more console platforms – the lone ecosystem where the project has not appeared yet.

It is almost a miracle Dispatch exists at all – the making-of is a saga

The backstory of Dispatch is, in several ways, as compelling as its plot. AdHoc Studio was founded in 2018 by Michael Choung, Nick Herman, Dennis Lenart, and Pierre Shorette – a quartet of designers, writers, and developers with Telltale Games credits on Minecraft: Story Mode, Batman: The Telltale Series, and The Walking Dead – who saw the closure of the American studio as a chance to strike out on their own.

Their debut project, Dispatch, emerged shortly after the studio formed, though it actually began life as a television series. When that incarnation failed to lift off, AdHoc’s founders pivoted to an interactive video game. The switch proved wise – the team leaned on its narrative and choice-driven chops to craft something tense, absorbing, and emotionally charged.

In fact, some members had been attached to The Wolf Among Us 2 before stepping away to pursue Dispatch. After years of turbulence at Telltale Games, AdHoc’s developers were hungry to explore new ideas. They aimed to reclaim the essence of narrative games while using new tools and enjoying greater creative freedom – an approach that has clearly resonated with players.

Best of all, as we have seen, Dispatch caught fire immediately. In under two weeks, it has blown past expectations, earning praise for its writing, art direction, and branching decision framework. All signs suggest this is merely the opening chapter of a new run of success for a studio that bet on itself and proved that interactive storytelling still has a lot left to say.

Source: 3DJuegos