Fire up Steam in the wee hours of the morning and you might notice a surprising new entry at the top of the platform’s most played games list: Goose goose duck. The free-to-play social deduction game was the #3 most-played game on Steam on Thursday, peaking at 563,677 players and overtaking Steam favorites such as PUBG: Battlegrounds, Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2and Apex Legends.
What drove Goose goose duckpopularity boost? Gaggle.fun, the developers behind it Goose goose duckOf course, she can thank the Korean pop giant BTS.
Goose goose duck was originally released in October 2021, after an Early Access launch six months earlier. The social deduction game, in which players take on the role of geese trying to exterminate the Masquerade duck (or other bird) among them, typically had a few thousand players a day and previously peaked at 21,362 players in February last year Peak dates from Steamcharts.
But in November last year, BTS’ V — real name Kim Taehyung — started streaming Goose goose duck to fans via the social app and web platform Weverse. (He also streamed fall guys and Between us.) Almost immediately, Goose goose duck quickly became a much bigger hit, going from around 6,000 top players in mid-November to almost 130,000 top players a month later. The game’s top player numbers tripled by the end of the year.
This success became overwhelming for Gaggle.fun, which published about a Goose goose duck Server outage on January 2nd due to mass influx of new players.
“We appreciate all the love and support,” the developer said in a post on Steam, “we expected a large increase in players, but not like this. 250,000 increase to our already massive player base was too much. We are working to increase capacity as soon as possible and will update everyone. We apologize for the inconvenience, we are all working hard to make sure everyone can play.”
Goose goose duckUnsurprisingly, the largest player base of , seems to be centralized in Asia. Related to Data from Steamcharts, player numbers increase in the evenings in Korea and are much lower in North America during the day. on Pull outthe game enjoys a modest audience, with only a few hundred viewers at the time of writing this article.
So while Goose goose duck seemed to set the gameplay and aesthetic direction Between us, the game appears to be following its lead in another way: it’s becoming an “overnight” success long after its debut, thanks to a popular streamer. With BTS currently on hiatus, hopefully the hitmakers from Korea’s biggest pop band can help other obscure games find new audiences.
