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This action-adventure RPG, released in 2016, features fast-paced combat and exploration. It has garnered 14,989 positive reviews on Steam, indicating strong player reception. The developer is currently unknown.
Overview
Hyper Light Drifter is a 2016 Action game developed by Heart Machine and published by Heart Machine. On Steam it has gathered 18,724 player reviews, 93% of them positive, which counts as a very positive reception among indie titles in the Action category. The game is available on linux, mac, windows, and launched at $20. The pairing of developer Heart Machine with publisher Heart Machine is one of the studio-publisher relationships indielist tracks, letting players find comparable games and letting developers and investors study how Action projects reach the market. indielist's white-box model estimates its lifetime sales at roughly 1.0 million to 2.4 million units, with the full Boxleiter factor breakdown shown on this page rather than a single black-box figure. Within indielist's catalog of indie games mapped to their studios, publishers, and funding, Hyper Light Drifter can be compared against similar Action titles and benchmarked on review counts and estimated sales.
Reviews
18,724
Positive
93%
Steam appid
257850
Engine
n/a
Sales estimate
vv1.01.0M to 2.4M
units (median: 1.7M)
≈ $11.5M to $26.9M net revenue (Steam cut + refunds + regional discount applied)
indielist estimates lifetime unit sales for Hyper Light Drifter at roughly 1.0 million to 2.4 million copies, with a median around 1.7 million, derived from its 18,724 Steam reviews using a multi-factor Boxleiter model (version v1.0). That median maps to approximately $19.2M in net revenue after Steam's 30% cut, regional pricing, and refunds. Unlike black-box trackers, the full calculation is shown on this page: a base review-to-sales multiplier is adjusted for release year, launch price, review sentiment, studio size, and genre, and every adjustment is listed so developers, publishers, and investors can audit exactly how the figure was reached. The range itself reflects genuine uncertainty — review-to-sales ratios vary widely between games — so indielist publishes a low, median, and high band rather than a false-precision single number, and treats free-to-play, heavily discounted, and bundle-distributed titles as having wider error margins still.
Price history
90d · low $14.61Over the last 90 days the price ranged from $14.61 to $19.99, averaging $19.12 across 2 discount windows, with a historical low of $14.61 on 2026-05-12.
Synthetic series for demo. Real ITAD price history loads after Day 3 ingest.
Where to buy
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Platforms
linuxmacwindows
Tags
Pixel GraphicsGreat SoundtrackAtmosphericAdventureIndieDifficultActionHack and SlashSingleplayerExplorationRPG2DColorfulTop-DownPost-apocalypticAction RPGMetroidvaniaSouls-likeFantasySci-fi
Frequently asked questions
- How many copies has Hyper Light Drifter sold?
- indielist estimates Hyper Light Drifter has sold between 1,011,096 and 2,359,224 units (median 1,685,160), derived from its 18,724 Steam reviews with the white-box Boxleiter vv1.0 method. The full breakdown is shown on the page.
- Who developed Hyper Light Drifter?
- Hyper Light Drifter was developed by Heart Machine and published by Heart Machine.
- When was Hyper Light Drifter released?
- Hyper Light Drifter was released in 2016.
- How many reviews does Hyper Light Drifter have on Steam?
- Hyper Light Drifter has 18,724 Steam reviews, of which 93% are positive.
Frequently asked questions
- How many copies has Hyper Light Drifter sold?
- indielist estimates Hyper Light Drifter has sold between 1,011,096 and 2,359,224 units (median 1,685,160), derived from its 18,724 Steam reviews with the white-box Boxleiter vv1.0 method. The full breakdown is shown on the page.
- Who developed Hyper Light Drifter?
- Hyper Light Drifter was developed by Heart Machine and published by Heart Machine.
- When was Hyper Light Drifter released?
- Hyper Light Drifter was released in 2016.
- How many reviews does Hyper Light Drifter have on Steam?
- Hyper Light Drifter has 18,724 Steam reviews, of which 93% are positive.
Ecosystem
indielist positions Hyper Light Drifter within the Action segment so players can surface comparable titles by shared tags and genre rather than by storefront promotion. On the developer side, Heart Machine's other releases and Heart Machine's wider catalog are one click away, letting developers benchmark where Hyper Light Drifter sits among a studio's body of work and how its publisher's portfolio performs. Because indielist maps studios, publishers, games, and funding into one connected graph, the same Hyper Light Drifter page serves three audiences at once: players hunting their next Action game, developers studying how comparable projects were positioned and what they sold, and investors tracing which teams and labels are active in the space. A machine-readable markdown mirror of this page is published at the same path with a .md suffix for AI assistants, and its review, price, and sales-estimate figures are refreshed on a schedule rather than frozen at launch.