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The pilot episode for the animated Hello Neighbor animated TV series, titled “Breaking and Entering” has hit 11m views on YouTube.
Hello Neighbor is a stealth horror game developed by Dynamic Pixels and published by tinyBuild. The game has seen remarkable success, boasting 30m players, as well as 2m books sold, resulting in $16m in sales from books alone.
“The game has a huge, loyal audience and making an animated series was the next logical step after books and games,” says tinyBuild CEO Alex Nichiporchik who co-produced the pilot. “We wanted to do a proof of concept pilot first to see exactly how many fans would become interested, and how well we can make the transition to 2D animation”.
“The pilot was initially drafted by the creator of the best selling Hello Neighbor book series, Carly Anne West. Then we took that draft and worked with an animation studio and internal writers to make the pilot. Our ideal situation is for the TV show to tie into other game projects, building to the next game in the series.”
Nichiporchik recently explained the franchise’s lifespan, stating “the current trend of the video game market is not in favour of publishers” and insisted publishers “[need] to be more creative and focus on building the long-lasting IPs” in order to succeed. Nichiporchik also believes publishers should listen to audiences and not critics, as while “early review impressions from critics were far from perfect”, “understanding the game’s audience made the next steps forward more clear”.
“Indie publishing is dead,” said Alex Nichiporchik. “It stopped being a sustainable business model the minute the number of mid-size publishers exceeded the number of good games being developed. Instead of focusing on one-off publishing deals, it’s better to build strong and entertaining brands. That means a large in-house development infrastructure that can support both internal games and external studios.”
