Poppy Playtime game director has logged 23,000 hours on Steam — and calls it market research

Bryce Clark, game director on Poppy Playtime: Chapter 5, has racked up 23,000 hours of Steam playtime. His explanation is straightforward: he's obsessed with learning the market, and he typically has three to six games running at once.

Right now Clark is juggling Aethus — a solo-dev base-building and crafting game he describes as having strong Subnautica energy, with cavern exploration and an oxygen system — alongside Strange Antiquities, the sequel to Strange Horticulture, which mixes narrative, puzzles, and mystery. His most niche current pick is Prosperous Universe, a real-time economic MMO where every player is a corporation shipping goods and navigating interstellar politics. Because production orders take hours to complete in real time, Clark treats it like an incremental game that fits into the gaps of his day. His most recent completed game was Librarian: Tidy Up the Arcane Library!, a $5 game about sorting 3,000 scattered books back onto shelves after an imp causes chaos.

Clark has been in game development for 20 years, with stints at 343 Industries and Blizzard before joining Mob Entertainment in 2023 as lead technical artist. He stepped up to game director for Poppy Playtime: Chapter 5, which launched in February. His focus for that chapter was tightening gameplay flow — making chases more compelling, tuning puzzle difficulty based on whether completion was optional or required, and weaving the narrative more naturally into the moment-to-moment experience. He grew up on DOS games, and his favourite childhood title was Dominus, a 1994 fantasy RTS so difficult to get running that his father spent hours on the phone with tech support trying to sort it out.