Fire up Steam in the early hours of the day and you might notice a surprising new entry near the top of the platform’s Most Played list: Goose Goose Duck. This free social deduction was the 3rd most played game on Steam as of Thursday, peaking at 563,677 players and surpassing Steam favorites like PUBG: Battlefield, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2and top legend.
What prompted? Goose Goose Duckits popularity? Goggle.fun, the developer behind Goose Goose DuckOf course, the Korean pop giant BTS can be thanked.
Goose Goose Duck was originally released in October 2021, following the launch of Early Access six months earlier. The social inference game, in which players act as geese trying to eliminate a rogue duck (or other bird) among them, typically has several thousand players a day, before peaking last February with 21,362 players, according to data from Steamcharts.
But last November, BTS’s V — real name Kim Taehyung — started streaming Goose Goose Duck fans through the social app and the Weverse web platform. (He also went live The fall boy and Between us.) Almost immediately, Goose Goose Duck quickly became a much bigger hit, going from about 6,000 concurrent players peaking in mid-November to nearly 130,000 peak concurrent players a month later. The game’s peak player count tripled at the end of the year.
That success became overwhelming for Goggle.fun, which posted about a Goose Goose Duck The server went down on January 2nd, allegedly due to a large influx of new players.
“We appreciate all the love and support,” the developer said in a Steam post, “we expected massive player growth but not like this. Our already huge 250,000 player count is just too much. We are working to increase the capacity as quickly as possible and will keep everyone updated. We apologize for the inconvenience, we are all working hard to make sure everyone can play.”
Goose Goose DuckThe ‘biggest player base’ seems, unsurprisingly, to be concentrated in Asia. Based data from Steamcharts, player numbers spike in the evening in Korea and much lower during the day in North America. Above convulsionThe game is attracting a modest audience, with only a few hundred viewers at the time of this writing.
So while Goose Goose Duck may have appeared to draw the gameplay and aesthetic direction from Between us, the game seems to be following its lead in a different way: by becoming an “overnight” success long after launch, thanks to a popular streamer. With BTS is currently on hiatushopefully the hit makers of Korea’s biggest pop band can help other lesser known games find new audiences.
