How Cure: A Hospital Simulator Uses Twitch to Captivate Streamers

For small independent game studios, standing out in a crowded marketplace presents a monumental challenge. Sentinel Games is tackling this head-on by designing its titles with streamers and discoverability as a core focus. Their approach involves building innovative Twitch integration tools directly into the gameplay, aiming to attract content creators who can provide invaluable organic promotion. This strategy is central to their debut title, Cure: A Hospital Simulator.

The studio’s founder, Doron Nir, brings a unique perspective from his previous careers in journalism and streaming technology. After founding a Hebrew-language games website, he later co-founded StreamElements, a successful platform offering tools for live-streamers. Observing the industry shift where creators became the primary marketing channel, Nir noticed a pattern. Certain indie games achieved viral success not through paid promotions, but because they naturally appealed to streamers’ audiences.

He identified a winning formula: these breakout hits were rarely single-player or heavily narrative-driven. Instead, they offered a light framework for multiplayer chaos and co-operative fun. Games like Supermarket Together, which sold millions of copies, exemplified this. Nir founded Sentinel Games with the mission to create titles that first and foremost provide a stage for entertaining online performance. A key part of this vision was to deeply connect the game engine to the streaming platform itself, leading to the development of their proprietary Shoutout Engine.

This technology powers Cure: A Hospital Simulator, a co-op game where players manage a hospital during a zombie apocalypse. While the core loop involves diagnosing patients and dealing with potential zombies, the standout feature is its seamless Twitch integration. Viewers can use a simple chat command to create an NPC patient, customized with their Twitch name and avatar, which then appears in the streamer’s game. Additionally, standard Twitch alerts for new followers or subscribers are displayed on in-game monitors within the virtual emergency room.

Nir points out that while other games have experimented with chat interaction, the Shoutout Engine introduces something new by embedding Twitch’s ecosystem directly into the game world. Crucially, the system is built with extensive customization for creators. A streamer with a small, intimate community can allow near-total participation, while a massive channel can implement strict queues and filters to prevent disruption. This flexibility is essential for making the tool viable for creators of all sizes.

Potential for viewer harassment is a serious concern, and Nir emphasizes that safety is the paramount consideration. The integration is designed with deliberate limitations. A viewer’s interaction is confined to creating an NPC; they cannot control it afterward. The NPC only carries the viewer’s Twitch username, which is moderated by Twitch’s own systems. The goal is to foster fun and chaos without compromising the streamer’s experience or safety.

The early results are promising. Since its Early Access launch, Cure has sold over 20,000 copies and been streamed by more than 1,000 creators, accumulating over 116,000 watched hours, all without a traditional marketing budget. The moment an audience discovers they can appear in the game with a chat command creates a powerful, engaging feedback loop. Sentinel Games plans to expand the Shoutout Engine to support Discord and eventually the Unity engine, with ambitions to license the technology to other developers. For now, this innovative approach to organic marketing through integrated streaming tools is proving to be a viable path for a small studio to find its audience.

(Source: Games Industry)