Hearth up Steam within the early hours of the day and also you may discover a stunning new entry close to the highest of the platform’s Most Performed record: 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, Name of Obligation: Trendy 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, after all.
Goose Goose Duck was initially launched in October 2021, after an Early Entry launch six months earlier. The social deduction sport, by which gamers tackle the position of geese making an attempt to root out the masquerading duck (or different hen) amongst them, sometimes had just a few thousand gamers every day, beforehand peaking in February final 12 months with 21,362 gamers, in accordance with information from Steamcharts.
However in November of final 12 months, V from BTS — actual identify Kim Taehyung — began streaming Goose Goose Duck to followers by the social app and net platform Weverse. (He additionally streamed Fall Guys and Amongst Us.) Nearly instantly, Goose Goose Duck rapidly 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 12 months.
That success turned overwhelming for Gaggle.enjoyable, which posted a couple of Goose Goose Duck server outage on Jan. 2, attributed to the mass inflow of latest gamers.
“We respect all of the love and assist,” the developer stated in a submit on Steam, “we anticipated a big improve in gamers however not like this. 250k improve of our already large participant base was an excessive amount of. We’re engaged on growing capability as quick as we will and can maintain everybody up to date. We apologize for the inconvenience, we’re all working laborious to verify everybody can play.”
Goose Goose Duck’s largest participant base seems to, unsurprisingly, be centralized in Asia. Based mostly on information from Steamcharts, participant numbers spike in the course of 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 just some hundred viewers on the time of this writing.
So whereas Goose Goose Duck might have appeared to attract gameplay and aesthetic path from Amongst Us, the sport appears to be following its lead in one other means: by changing into an “in a single day” success lengthy after its debut, because of a preferred streamer. With BTS at present on hiatus, hopefully the hitmakers of Korea’s largest pop band may also help different obscure video games discover a new viewers.
