Fireplace 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 Performed 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, 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, through which gamers tackle the position of geese attempting to root out the masquerading duck (or different fowl) amongst them, usually had a couple of thousand gamers every day, beforehand peaking in February final yr with 21,362 gamers, based on information from Steamcharts.
However in November of final yr, V from BTS — actual identify Kim Taehyung — began streaming Goose Goose Duck to followers via the social app and internet platform Weverse. (He additionally streamed Fall Guys and Amongst Us.) Virtually instantly, Goose Goose Duck rapidly grew to become a a lot larger hit, going from round 6,000 peak concurrent gamers in mid-November to just about 130,000 peak concurrent gamers a month later. The sport’s peak participant numbers tripled by the tip of the yr.
That success grew to become 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 help,” the developer mentioned in a submit on Steam, “we anticipated a big improve in gamers however not like this. 250k improve of our already huge participant base was an excessive amount of. We’re engaged on rising capability as quick as we are able to and can hold 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. Primarily based on information 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 just some hundred viewers on the time of this writing.
So whereas Goose Goose Duck could have appeared to attract gameplay and aesthetic route from Amongst Us, the sport appears to be following its lead in one other method: by changing into an “in a single day” success lengthy after its debut, due to a well-liked streamer. With BTS presently on hiatus, hopefully the hitmakers of Korea’s greatest pop band may also help different obscure video games discover a new viewers.