"We kind of forgot that we're a game developer": Fingersoft's journey to Hill Climb Racing 3

• The Hill Climb Racing series has generated more than 2.5 billion downloads to date.
• Hill Climb Racing 3 has now entered soft launch on Google Play in the UK, Norway, Sweden and Finland.
• Fingersoft is now looking after its live games while prototyping more new titles for potential release.

The Hill Climb Racing series is one of Finland’s most famous exports.

Developed by Fingersoft, headquartered in the Northern city of Oulu, the IP has been a global smash hit, amassing more than 2.5 billion downloads.

First launched on mobile in 2012, the franchise still has over four million people playing it every day, with 300,000 to 400,000 also installing the original each day. Not bad for a title coded in five months from the founder’s bedroom.

“We kind of expected that it's going to be this shooting star that suddenly appears and then it dies down,” Fingersoft chief growth officer Daniel Rantala tells PocketGamer.biz in an interview. 

“So we started to also develop new game titles based on Hill Climb Racing.”

To follow-up its first hit, it launched Awesome Racing into soft launch in 2016. The title wasn’t meant as a direct sequel - but fans were convinced it was.

“Hill Climb Racing 2 wasn’t supposed to be a sequel, but it somehow turned out to be a sequel because players thought it was.”

Hill Climb Racing 2, as it was then called, released in December 2016, a launch which Rantala says the team, and its servers, were “blown away by”. Despite being a direct sequel, Ranatala states that both the titles retain their own player base and continue to coexist.

New release

After that launch, before stepping into developing more new games, Fingersoft set about building its live teams and live games first. In 2020, the studio started work on Hill Climb Racing 3, which has been in production for around three years and has just entered into soft launch on Google Play in the UK, Norway, Sweden and Finland.

HCR 3 builds on the series with new 3D visuals and real-time PvP action that sees players race to the finish line while also having the tools to scupper their opponents’ chances such as the ability to shoot chickens or activate EMPs.

The title also expands on the series with new characters, building on the IP's current star Bill Newton.

“The main difference between Hill Climb Racing 3 compared to the previous games is that it's 3D, has real-time PVP and it’s going to be significantly more action-packed than the previous games,” he said.

“In the previous games, the main point has always been gas and brake gas and brake, balance the vehicle, don’t do the neck break. Those familiar things will still be in the third iteration, but we're adding the real multiplayer which gives us a lot of different options to do. We’re adding more chaos by allowing the players to directly interact with each other.”

The soft launch of Hill Climb Racing 3 comes nearly nine years after HCR 2 - though Fingersoft did release spin-off LEGO Hill Climb Adventures last year. Rantala says HCR 3 isn’t built to replace the previous entries, but rather to coexist alongside them. 

“Back when Hill Climb Racing 2 was released, we were a little bit afraid that there would be cannibalisation but we still decided to call it Hill Climb Racing 2, so a sequel to the original one, but then it turns out that if there was cannibalisation, it was so low that we didn't realise that it was.”

He adds that the lack of cannibalisation comes down to player motivations - with HCR 1 players playing against their own previous records, while in HCR 2 saw players competing against other players’ records.

Evolving industry

A lot has changed in the industry since HCR 2’s launch, such as privacy changes to the App Store, sparking the decline of hypercasual and rise of hybridcasual business models.

Where the original HCR had 80% of its revenue come from ads and 20% IAPs, HCR 2 now has 65% of revenue from IAPs. With HCR 3, Rantala says IAPs will be the primary driver for sales - though there will still be ads - supported by a Season Pass.

Rantala says that when it comes to driving high numbers of downloads - with the series achieving 2.5 billion installs to date - Fingersoft hopes HCR 3 can prove as popular, but the team isn’t expecting those same levels. The studio still expects a significant amount of organic downloads, however, believing in the IP’s relevancy nearly a decade after its predecessor.

Asked why Fingersoft has taken so long to release HCR 3 - and why its release slate has been so light over the years - Ranatala offers a frank response.

“We were focusing heavily on the live ops and operating the live games, and we also decided, I think it was in 2019 or 2020, to take the route of putting a lot of ammo into one / two big games than having constant prototyping. 

“I would even go as far as to say that for a while there we kind of forgot that we're a game developer and we went more into a game maintenance mode, where we trusted on these big bets, and eventually we weren’t really able to push out any proper prototypes.”

Rantala says while some ideas emerged through different solutions to find new ideas - such as demo days and game camps - these would often go down the same path: a lack of resources for them over games already in production or that were already live.

“So that has changed. We now finally have a really talented prototyping team and actually we're looking at testing three, new prototypes by the end of the year.”

“Secure place”

Despite having a globally popular IP, Fingersoft has been through the same challenges that other studios have faced over the past couple of years. At the end of 2024, the studio laid off 14 staff after a “substantial decline” in ad revenue. There have also been some executive shakeups - Teemu Närhi returned as the studio’s CEO in February, while longtime COO Ville Rauma departed around the same time.

With aging games, layoffs and leadership changes - is there a lot riding on HCR 3 to be a success? Rantala says that following changes to make HCR 2 more IAP-driven, it’s now generating more revenue than ever. 

“We’ve at a very secure place,” he insists. “We’re not out of the woods yet, nobody can say that they are, except maybe Supercell.

“I wouldn’t say we’re riding on HCR 3 and the success of it. We’re in a good place with our live games and we’re doing a lot of other games as well.”