The hit indie game has pushed past Among Us’ all-time players record on Steam.
Gaggle Studio’s free-to-play social deduction game, Goose Goose Duck, has become the third most-played game on Steam this week, smashing through the concurrent players of Apex Legends, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II, and PUBG: Battlegrounds. Most importantly, Goose Goose Duck peaked at 563,677 players on January 5th, breaking Among Us’ all-time record from two years ago by over a hundred thousand players.
The Among Us clone surpassed its inspiration’s previous peak of 447,476 thanks to a large number of newcomers. According to industry insider Daniel Ahmad, this significant increase in the player count is propelled by the game’s popularity in Asian countries. However, many others believe that the success of Goose Goose Duck can be attributed to a live stream by BTS member Kim Tae-Hyung.
Although player numbers for the indie game began to skyrocket at the beginning of 2023, Goose Goose Duck has hit its peak with a live stream by popular BTS member Kim Tae-Hyung. He appears to have helped the game accelerate its outreach and become a much bigger hit on Steam. Besides, Daniel Ahmad says China and South Korea have been key markets for the game’s popularity over the last week.
Before surpassing Among Us in terms of concurrent players, Goose Goose Duck suffered from server issues caused by the growth in player numbers. In order to take newcomers in, mostly from Asia countries according to data from Steamcharts, developer Gaggle Studio addressed the server outage by increasing capacity. Almost immediately, it built a massive player base which saw an impressive peak on Steam.
After an early access period that lasted six months, Goose Goose Duck was released for Steam back in October 2021 as a copycat version of Among Us. It requires players to work together as fellow geese to find who infiltrated their team. Becoming the first viral hit of 2023, Goose Goose Duck is available now on Steam, iOS, and Android.
