Fire up Steam within the early hours of the day and also you would possibly discover a shocking new entry close to the highest of the platform’s Most Played checklist: Goose Goose Duck. The free-to-play social deduction sport was the No. 3 most-played sport on Steam on Thursday, reaching a peak of 563,677 gamers and pushing previous Steam favorites like PUBG: Battlegrounds, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, and Apex Legends.
What has pushed Goose Goose Duck’s surge in recognition? Gaggle.enjoyable, the builders behind Goose Goose Duck, can thank Korean pop behemoth BTS, in fact.
Goose Goose Duck was initially launched in October 2021, after an Early Access launch six months earlier. The social deduction sport, during which gamers take on the function of geese attempting to root out the masquerading duck (or different chook) amongst them, usually had a few thousand gamers every day, beforehand peaking in February final yr with 21,362 gamers, in accordance to knowledge from Steamcharts.
But in November of final yr, V from BTS — actual title Kim Taehyung — began streaming Goose Goose Duck to followers via the social app and internet platform Weverse. (He additionally streamed Fall Guys and Among Us.) Almost instantly, Goose Goose Duck shortly turned a a lot greater hit, going from round 6,000 peak concurrent gamers in mid-November to almost 130,000 peak concurrent gamers a month later. The sport’s peak participant numbers tripled by the tip of the yr.
That success turned overwhelming for Gaggle.enjoyable, which posted about a Goose Goose Duck server outage on Jan. 2, attributed to the mass inflow of recent gamers.
“We appreciate all the love and support,” the developer mentioned in a put up on Steam, “we expected a large increase in players but not like this. 250k increase of our already massive player base was too much. We’re working on increasing capacity as fast as we can and will keep everyone updated. We apologize for the inconvenience, we’re all working hard to make sure everyone can play.”
Goose Goose Duck’s largest participant base seems to, unsurprisingly, be centralized in Asia. Based on knowledge from Steamcharts, participant numbers spike throughout the evenings in Korea, and are a lot a lot decrease throughout daytime in North America. On Twitch, the sport is having fun with a modest viewers, with simply a few hundred viewers on the time of this writing.
So whereas Goose Goose Duck might have appeared to draw gameplay and aesthetic route from Among Us, the sport appears to be following its lead in one other manner: by turning into an “overnight” success lengthy after its debut, thanks to a fashionable streamer. With BTS at the moment on hiatus, hopefully the hitmakers of Korea’s greatest pop band can assist different obscure video games discover a new viewers.
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