The Ringer-Verse - Speedrunning the Surprise Steam Sensations of 2025 | Button Mash

Episode Date: November 24, 2025

Ben brings on Simon Carless of GameDiscoverCo and Morgan Park of PC Gamer to explain the success of some of the most popular games released this year that haven’t previously been discussed on the podcast: surprise Steam sensations ‘R.E.P.O.,’ ‘Schedule I,’ ‘Peak,’ ‘Megabonk,’ ‘Escape From Duckov,’ and ‘RV There Yet?’ They break down how unknown PC games go viral, how long their time in the spotlight usually lasts, and what these huge hits have to teach us about the gaming landscape in 2025. Intro (0:00)Steam sensations speedrun (11:52)Outro (1:17:15) Host: Ben LindberghGuests: Simon Carless and Morgan ParkProducer: Devon RenaldoAdditional Production Support: Arjuna Ramgopowell Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, everyone, it's Amy Polar, and I'm launching a new podcast called Good Hang. In preparation for that, I asked some of my friends to send in some videos and give me some advice. Just be yourself, and the guests will come. Don't be the celebrity that this is their like six things they're doing. I love two crime and cooking podcasts. Is there any way you could combine the two? Well, everyone has an opinion and a podcast. So, join me for Good Hang.

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You don't need WeatherTech floor liners in the summer, unless you hit the beach or go camping. Then you'd want a cargo liner. Or a road trip goes sideways, ketchup goes rogue, ice cream drips. Yeah, you'd be pretty happy about those weather tech seat protectors. So just to be clear as the mud, you're inevitably going to step into the summer. You don't need weather tech unless you plan on doing summer. Visit weathertech.com today. Hello and welcome into The Ringerverse, your nexus speed for all things fandom.

I'm Benvenberg, senior editor for The Ringer, and your host here at Button Mesh. Although we have much more mashing ahead of us in December, we are approaching the end of the year, a time when we look back at what we've enjoyed over the past 12 months, but also what we've missed. And here at But Mesh, there's been a bit of a hole in our coverage, which we'll try to fill today. I am not talking about a game about digging a hole, which we also did not cover here on But Mesh. That came out back in February and was mildly popular for a minute, but I'm talking about the biggest steam sensations of 2025 bigger, orders of magnitude bigger than a game about digging a hole, the games that went viral on Valve's massive PC storefront, but earned only a passing mention at most on this podcast today. we'll be addressing those oversights by speed running these steam sensations to figure out why they were hits and what their success says about modern gaming. On this episode, our concurrent podcaster count is three.

Joining me for this guided tour of gaming's viral hits is Simon Carless, founder of Game Discover Co, a company that analyzes how people find and purchase and play games in a data-driven way. and through the Game Discover Co newsletter has become one of the ways I find out what I'm missing, which is always a lot. Welcome, Simon. Thanks. And because I am no longer primarily a PC gamer, at least until I get myself a Steam Machine, I have recruited someone who works for PC gamer, an authentic PC gamer. Staff writer Morgan Park, welcome Morgan. Thanks for having you. So gentlemen, I do not want to alarm you, but we are on pace for almost 20,000 games.

released on Steam this year, about 54 per day, about two and a quarter per hour. So that total could climb while we are speaking. Statistically speaking, on average, a couple of games will come out on Steam during the recording of this podcast. And most of those games just disappear into the void. But even if we include only games that Valve says have, quote, achieved broad player engagement and some commercial success, we're on pace for more than 4,400, or roughly 12 per day. And these counts keep increasing by the year. So way too many for any one person to keep track of,

which I guess is why we need Game Discover Coe and why we need this episode. Now, it's sort of your jobs to keep track of what is popping off on Steam at any given time, but I wonder how difficult that job is. Do you, like me, ever feel overwhelmed by the deluge, the avalanche of games that suddenly we need to know the names of because we hadn't heard of them a week ago and now hundreds of thousands of people are playing them. How do you navigate this, Simon?

Yeah, well, it is, yeah, it's complicated out of that. I mean, we algorithmically navigated to some extent, which is to say we're... Sorting a leaderboard. Yeah, constantly looking at everything that's coming out and sort of seeing, you know, what's popular. Even unreleased games, you can see stuff like how it's ranking on the top, on the top wish list chart, which is still, which, has and also you can see how many followers it has and you know steam follows is when you follow it to get news about it so yeah so to some extent we're trying to look at that but often a lot of the interesting stuff is happening off of steam like on ticot or on youtube or on twitch and then that gets fed back into steam and makes the game more popular so it is quite complicated to keep track of this

stuff especially because it's like you know keeping track of books but anyone try and keep track with books as a concept i don't think that would be a good idea but we try and keep track of games I guess. Right. I know. That's what makes covering gaming so exciting, but also so challenging, is that there's so many different ways to play games. If someone describes themselves as a gamer, that could mean any number of things. And some of those spears and subcultures don't overlap at all. Gaming just contains multitudes. It's a big tent. It's a rich tapestry. And Morgan, I imagine that when a game just climbs the charts at PC gamer, like I'm imagining claxons going off and people sliding down poles and like reporting for duty.

I'm suddenly, because you're like a beat writer, but your beat changes. Like lately you've been covering arc raiders. You probably didn't know several months ago that you would be on the arc raters beat right now. So how does that rise to the attention of the staff and then how did those responsibilities get divvied up? Yeah, I mean, you know, similar to Simon just having, you know, the skills to recognize when something is rising, like we're a bit more reacting

in the moment as it's already sort of popping up, but yeah, we check, we see those steam numbers all the time. We're looking at like concurrent charts for the day, but yeah, sometimes it is like, okay, this game, we should probably have somebody playing this at least, you know. It's nice when it's a game that like

a lot of people on staff already want to play. But you're right, like, you know, in the same way that these teams sort of fell by the wayside for the podcast this year. Like, it can be hard in even a staff of 30, like we have 30 plus, that people checking out these small gems, because sometimes they're like little bright spots

and sometimes they're just like endure all year. Right. You know, like repo and pizza and the other ones will be talking about. Yeah, that's something I want to ask about too, the staying power or lack thereof in some cases. And yeah, it's tough because you chart out, we might look at the beginning of the year.

What will we cover on button mesh this year? What are our most anticipated games? And maybe there are some huge tent poles or massive sequels or, games that have a whole lot of buzz and budget behind them that you can kind of at least pencil in because, of course, a game can always get delayed or postponed. But you figure if this comes out, we will probably be covering it. But a lot of the games that we're covering today or games in this genre might not really be on the radar whatsoever, at least for most people, you know, if you're

making a list of what are my most anticipated games of 2026, there will be surprise drops and there will be games that maybe have been announced, but no one really cares about yet because we just don't have a sense. So that's my question for you, Simon, as the sage, as the prognosticator, as the soothsayer, how predictable or foreseeable is the success of games like this for you? No, I mean, generally not, because a lot of these games just need to get in front of the public. So it's really, some of them get in front of the public directly after they come out. Some of them have demos. So maybe you can get an early idea. But certainly Megabonk, for example, which we're going to talk about, you know, that's a game that's gone incredibly well virally. But it did so very gradually. So, you know, you're sort of seeing situations where, oh, it has 3,000 concurrent users on its first day. And then fast forward to like 10 days later and suddenly it has 50,000. So a lot of these things come in kind of viral waves. And it is quite difficult to predict when that's going to happen. And sometimes why?

Yeah. Is that among the better publicly available metrics to look at the concurrence, how many people are playing at any given time? Because obviously there are all kinds of caveats and some games aren't on Steam or aren't as big on Steam as others or they're all on all kinds of other platforms and it's not really reflected there. Or maybe it's a single player game that sells well over time but doesn't have the same stack of people playing it in any particular time. So you, of course, your company has deeper metrics and, projected sales and you're able to sort of impute or infer some of those things. But based on the surface stuff that we can see, is that generally a good guide for what's actually popular? Yeah, I think it's a largely good guide. As you say, you run into issues. A good example is we often do, what is the top CCU of the games that launched this week on Steam? And quite often there will be idle games in here. And I do often point out that it's quite likely if you have 4,000 CCU on an idle game, that's going to be, yeah, significantly... It's banana clicker.

Yeah, yeah. And there's also now desktop idler games where you're meant to have them on all the time. So I think, yeah, I think CCU, also CCU at launch is sometimes difficult. For example, if you have pre-orders for a game, then people are queued up to get it like day one. So, for example, you'll see, we have a little formula, which is we think maybe peak CCU first couple of days. If you times it by maybe 20, that might be week one sales. But then you run into some of these big paradox games which have a ton of pre-orders. So everyone jumps on it like day one. And that actually significantly decreases. Like I think I've seen some paradox games, some big grand strategy games where they've had like eight times like peak early CCU is week one

sales. And that's just because, you know, everyone, everyone jumps on it early because they already pre-ordered it and it's maybe even preloaded and stuff. So yeah, I'd say CCU is useful. But yeah, there's several, several carry-ats with CCU and you can gross a lot of money with low CCU. if you have an interesting enough game sometimes. Yeah, tough to generalize. And of course, there are some huge powerhouses that aren't on Steam at all, which perhaps we will touch on here.

So along with the perennial powerhouses, you look at the top of the CCU list, and that is what we will be relying on today. So I'm glad you didn't immediately invalidate the metric that we're using for this discussion, but you're always going to see the old Counterstrike 2 and Dota 2 and Pub. G, they're always going to be there. But we're interested in the games that crash

the party, at least for a time today. And according to my browsing of the website, SteamDB, 31 games released in 2025 have peaked above 100,000 concurrent players. So more than 100,000 people were playing them at their peak popularity simultaneously. About half of those are games that we have covered on the pod. And you wouldn't necessarily think of them as Steam sensations. Exactly, they're just popular games. They're just Silk Song. They're borderlands. They're the big blockbusters. I'd say six meet the profile that I'm looking for here today that are sort of steam sensations that kind of came out of nowhere and took over for a while, really went viral. Their budget games lower priced, but not free, which means that people did actually

have to shell out something to play these things, which makes it a bit more impressive, I think. And the games that we're going to be covering are Schedule 1, Escape from Duckov, which is a game that just makes me smile every time I see the title or think of it conceptually. Repo, peak, Megabunk, and the latest to join the club, barely. R.V. There yet. So I think we can focus on those six, and Morgan can explain how they work, why they're fun, just sort of summarize what the game is, and Simon can relay any insights he has into why they broke out, aside from that fun factor and what that means for gaming, what lessons we can learn. And if you can share which games, which other games, the player of each one also tended to play to see the overlap, that would

be interesting too. So let's go in chronological release order, which means that we will start with repo, which is short for retrieve, extract, and profit operation. This is an online co-op survival horror game released February 26th in early access for 999. developed and published by Swedish Studio Semiwork, and this maxed out at 271,571 people playing at the same time. Morgan, how would you describe repo? Yeah, so it's like a co-op cooperative horror game. You and like four friends, you go into these creepy sort of post-apocalyptic treasure hunts

in dilapidated places. And similar to like, you know, it's kind of a continuation of this trend we've seen, of co-op games like lethal company and phasmodophobia. In my opinion, like, kind of the evolved sort of better form of this, because it has really fun twist. So like, to a degree, it has what you expect, right? Like, you go in, you get stuff, you get out, you do kill by scary monsters. That's really fun. But it has really effective proximity chat, right? So, like, it creates these social moments where, like, you just hear your friends screaming from down the hallway. And, like, I think the most novel thing about it is that when you're carrying

these objects through the buildings and stuff. You have to actually pick them up. Their physics objects. You have to sort of hover them in front of you. Right. And they're pretty fragile and awkward. Yeah, exactly. Before this game was what it became, it was you're sort of playing

like as a moving company. I think the developers have said. And you feel that in the game because when you're holding objects, you have to rotate them around to fit them through doorways. And if you bump them in the stuff, they lose value. And by the time you get to the stretching point,

they're like worth whatever. And yeah, I've played it a lot with friends this year. It's like, you know, these are the types of games that I can actually get my friends to play pretty easily. It's not really a hard pitch. And yeah, I still think it's one of the strongest of these types of games ever made. So it's like, it's awesome that it blew up. Like, it's really good. It's, you know, we're going to talk about friends slop or whatever.

I'm pretty flawed label if you asked me. I think it less describes slopping the way that we think about with AI or something. And more describes. games that have intentional rough edges that you just accept because, you know, we used to accept rough edges in games before they cost like half a billion dollars to make or whatever. Yeah, yeah, the bar is a little lower. The barrier for entry, if it's $9.99, a little bit different from if it's $69 or $79.99.

And, yeah, since you invoke that term, I guess we can cover it here. It's kind of amorphous. It's tough to define. But back in March, inspired by repo and also games from the last couple of years, like Lethal Company, as you mentioned, or content-warning. A Twitter user coined this term friend-slop to describe, as they put it, a genre whose sole purpose is friend farming. It's hard to translate this from internet speak, but it was originally intended to be a joke,

not a serious label or a criticism, but it then did kind of get co-opted, speaking of co-op, into a criticism because the slop, yes, there's the association with, AI slop, which is typically derogatory. And it kind of morphed into this catch-all term for online indie co-op, low-budget, kind of low production value games. And I guess there were people who were sort of seriously suggesting, like, looking down at the idea that you would want to play something with your friends or something. I don't know what that says about those people.

And then people just sort of saying, oh, this is like driving engagements. You know, it's like it's not a good game. it's just for virality or it's just for attention as if those things kind of have to go hand in hand and that you can't have virality and engagement with an actual good game, which I guess is what you're saying. And so a lot of the uses of friend slop then became defensive

and defending the quote unquote friend slop games as actually good, which it sounds like that's where you stand on repo at least. Oh, yeah, absolutely. It's an extremely well-crafted game. It just you can tell, I mean, it looks like it was made by, you know, eight very talented people or whatever. I actually don't know exactly.

Yeah, it's, you know, it is priced according to what you expect from it. And that's kind of the magic of these games. They're easy to sell to your friends. Yeah, I think Friends Lop is a little pejorative. And I've tried to go, I've tried to coin my own phrase, which is crew-like. But I don't think anyone's really going with that. But, you know, you hang out with your crew and a lot of these have like road-like elements. We'll make it happen here.

Yeah. Get the button mash pump now. Exactly. But yeah, I mean, I think it is a really well-made game. I think that's a really, really important point, which is a lot of these games are pretty well-made. And obviously, a couple of, a few of the games we're going to talk about here are following on from Lethal Company, and they do a lot of the kind of voice chat, you know, voice distortion, kind of hanging out with your friends elements. And if I look at our data, you know, we have data. What if you played a certain game on Steam, what else did you play? And I'm looking at the data for anything that has overlap, high overlap, but you're more than five times more than. likely to have played it than the average steam user. So we get lethal company, which is played by 10% of all steam users, but 54% of people who played repo. And then peak, yeah, it's played by 44% and content morning, 29%. Schedule 1, 23% of a year that 13%. So I think there's a real grouping. And we're going to talk about something about the game. It's a real grouping. People really like this subgenre and they're moving between games in this subgeneral of the top titles.

Right. Yeah. And it depends, I guess, on whether the company is good. If you're playing it with friends, it's a different experience than if you're playing it alone or if you can play it alone even. Or if you're playing it with people you don't know, it's a good game for having your proximity chat on. And even though you described it as a horror game, and I did too, and it is technically, it's not a horror game the way that Resident Evil or Silent Hill are horror games, right? It's scary but goofy, you know. It's a haunted house you go through with friends. You're looking to get scared.

you're looking to laugh at your friend's misfortunes. Yes. Right. And like a lot of the games we're talking about today, it kind of looks like crap, but on purpose, like in an intentional way. I mean, it's, you know, it looks like a game that wouldn't have wowed you 20 years ago,

just in terms of the sheer graphical visual appearance of it. And it's like a little janky physically, but again, in kind of an endearing way, where maybe because you're not expecting that much, of it from a production value standpoint, you're more forgiving or you're willing, or it just makes it more random or less predictable and more fun. And there's like a real challenge to it.

There's a difficulty curve. Like you can get good at repo or have a difficult run. So what is your takeaway, Simon, from repo? What lessons could other developers draw from the appeal here? Well, I think the big thing is, I think people didn't really understand that lethal company was a genre. And I think for a while, people were like, oh, lethal company is a great game, but no one was really making lethal company likes.

And I think maybe content warning was an April Fool's game from the same folks who coalford Peak. So that was sort of the starting point of people sort of saying, oh, actually we can make games that are like this, but are in a different setting. And internally, if you look at the history of repo, the same devs actually made a really good-looking things like Roadlight called Voidigo, I think, which they spent a long time on and didn't do very well. And so I think they sort of took from that, well, we might want to try and do something a little bit more commercial with the rest of our month. So that's what they did. Good call.

All right. So after Repos reign for a month or so, it was succeeded by our second game, Schedule 1, which is an open world crime simulator slash first person management sim released about a month later, March 24th in early access for 1999. and this was developed and published by an Australian studio, TBGS, Tyler's Video Game Studio, and this went even bigger. So this peaked higher than peak, higher than anything, I guess that we'll be talking about today, at 459,075 players, important to be precise, down to the individual player. So Morgan, what did you make of Schedule 1 when it took over everything?

Yeah, this is another one that came out of literally, nowhere. We always say that like, as you mentioned, when we're thinking about games are most excited for every year, we have to leave these blank spaces for games that did not exist until they just come out. And Schedule 1 is maybe the biggest example of that because it's essentially one person with a little bit of like art help or, you know, I think someone helped them with the graffiti. But it's this, as you mentioned, open world crime simulator with a fully simulated town with named residents, with all the, with such schedules and personalities. It's like essentially like GTA, if it was smaller scale,

but also had more of an emphasis on the actual business of producing drugs and selling them street level. It's, you know. Even Lexer law enforcement. Yeah, exactly. Very morally dubious stuff, but it's all sort of taken. Like, it's weirdly, it's a very chill game. Like, you can do fun stuff, like name your own drudge and try to get the most, like,

lucrative recipe. You might mix Red Bull with, like, you know, painkillers and just see what sort of meth comes out of that. I'm not actually sure if there's meth, but there's definitely, like, weed and stuff. But I think this one really just was impressively unexpected for, like, it's scale and depth and quality. Like, yes, it looks, it's another game that just sort of looks, like, you know, lo-fi. But, like, like, like, Repo and, like Pete will talk about it's, they leverage at least simple graphics by having really expressive characters. They do a lot with the art style they chose. Like these characters have big eyes, sort of like obvious features, you know, bags under their eyes or distinct outfits.

And they're written decently well. And so, yeah, like what it lacks in like AAA polish, obviously, it just doubles and triples down and like how much stuff there is to do in it. You can buy houses, upgrade your business, hire employees that you can actually like walk around and watch them sell your product throughout the day. You can start Curf Wars. I think they added a cartel update in the last few months. I have not checked out. But yeah, like, you know, it's a much smaller operation than repo, and yet it attracted more like at least concurrent players over time.

And I think that comes down to just like, you say GTA in a game in the same sentence, people are going to be a little more curious about it. Even if it's more animal crossing than GTA. I mean, true. Although if you can say both of those things in the same sentence, then even more people perk up potentially. So, yeah, it is kind of comfy or comfortable. hosy in a way, even though it is essentially a breaking bad simulator.

You can be Walter White. You can sell drugs. And we're also talking about a game that's just as fun single player as multiplayer. It has four-player co-op. You can do everything together. You can actually get easier with more players. But it's absolutely, you can just be a solo breaking bad drug pin taken over the town. So, Simon, does this have much overlap with repo?

Or is this in a separate category where maybe it's more in the simulator, the insert thing simulator space. Yeah, that's actually what I was going to say, which is it is an interesting hybrid because I think unlike some of these other games, it is pretty playable single player and you do see a lot of people talking about having played it for a long time single player.

And so it's definitely got elements of the kind of lethal companies in it, but also, yeah, there's a whole set of, you know, first person simulators have been around for a long time. There is, of course, a game called Drug Dealer Simulator, which has a sequel that is quite close to Schedule 1. And I think there was some litigation amongst the dev and the publisher of that game after Schedule 1 came out

because they were so mad that it didn't do as well or something. But I think the point is, yeah, there's definitely a whole set of these Perspersons and simulator games that do well. And I think this is sort of a good example. By the way, we have it as grossing $130 million on Steam so far, which is insane for a solo dev. I mean, you're netting out only about $70 million from that.

Yeah, much more lucrative than actually developing a drug empire, probably. That's just making Schedule I. So, yeah, there's a whole genre of, you know, supermarket simulator or thing that sounds mundane or like it might be a drag in real life. But for whatever reason, it's very satisfying to then do the digital version of that. And this has a hook, right, where, oh, I'm becoming a drug kingpin and it sounds sort of edgy. You know, there's like a little bit of shock value. or intrigue or, this is against the rules. This is something that I couldn't do legally in real life.

And so I'll try it in the video game simulator. But then it's also not exactly what you would expect from that in terms of the aesthetic. And it is just a chill game, as you said. And so it's kind of best of both worlds, I guess, maybe. So is the takeaway here that you have to have a hook? I mean, there are some games that are only hook, and maybe that's enough to reel people in at first, but not to really satisfy them for very long.

I mean, you can put out banana, and you're just clicking a banana, and that's many people will do that, and it's almost ironic in a way. You're in on the joke, and you're all doing this thing that's kind of pointless, but it's fun, and it becomes kind of this internet community

or in-joke, essentially. But Schedule 1 is not that. Schedule 1, even in early access, was a deep, full-fledged game. It's tricky because I think, yeah, too much hook up front, and then there's nothing to do, is sort of a problem, but I think people have always liked, you know, the crime elements.

And I think this is a great example of a game that sort of does the crime stuff well. While being surprisingly amiable about it, as Morgan pointed out, it's really, really not that stressful again, some of the time. It's just, you're just kind of kicking back and doing stuff. So, yeah, I think it's just amazing execution, especially for basically a solo dev. And that's really what can happen nowadays. That's why it's such a level playing field on Steam. Anyone can block up and make a game like this and do great. Right. And I think that's in addition to the budget price.

That's why people are more understanding about the lo-fi aesthetic, the more rudimentary look, because you're not paying for AAA polish here. And so it's okay if it looks like it could have been made 20 years ago because it was made by one person. And the tools are out there to use Unity or Unreal or whatever it is. And you kind of get some components off the rack and maybe you don't need as huge a team. to put together something that's pretty compelling. And I guess what we've found over the years is that ultimately the gameplay trumps the graphics.

You'd like to have both ideally, especially if you're paying a premium price, but ultimately what's going to keep you coming back is how it feels to play, regardless of how it looks. And so if people don't have to pay that much to get through the door, and then the gameplay loop is satisfying,

then, yeah, you have something that might not appear impressive in a screenshot or a video or something, Although that's pretty important from a sales and hook perspective too, Simon Wright, is that you need to have something that looks good in short bursts so that you can catch people's attention. Yeah, I think you need to grab people's attention, although I think what grabs people at people's attention sometimes is simply the premise of the game and what you seem to be doing in it. So you don't necessarily have to have something that looks like a knockout nowadays. And in some cases, I think people are a little skeptical of stuff that looks too good,

particularly because on PC you have a large range of specs. There's been a lot of issues with console games launching and not playing very well on a lot of PC hardware. So I actually think there's a little aversion nowadays. If something looks absolutely amazing, then people may be like, well, that's going to run great on the PlayStation 5 Pro. And I'm going to try and run it on my mid-level PC. It's going to fall over and I'm going to get super mad.

So in some ways, I think these egalitarian titles that have serviceable graphics, you know, a better position to the PC. Yeah, and we're getting diminishing returns when it comes to graphical upgrades anyway at this point. So maybe people deprioritize it to a certain extent. And there's just the conscious retro nostalgia trend, whether it's just, you know, games that look like they were on the S&ES or maybe games that look like they were on the original PlayStation and they're kind of pixelated and blocky, but creepy. I guess what you really want is something distinctive. And it doesn't have to be super high poly count rate traced 4K. it could be completely in the other direction.

But as long as it stands out from the pack, from that avalanche of other games that we were talking about, as long as it has some distinctive style that maybe makes you take a second look or linger a little longer before you scroll away from it, that can work for you. Okay, let's get to our third game, which we have alluded to, Peak,

which is a co-op climbing game. This was released on June 16th for $7.99. This was developed and published by AgroCrague, and landfall, and this one, Pete, so to speak, at 170, 759. And this is actually the only one of these games that is still nominated, I guess, for an award at the Game Awards peak is up for best multiplayer game. So Morgan, tell us about your peak experience. Yeah, so as I mentioned earlier, this comes from a collaboration between dev that recently

made an action game about a crab, which kind of plays like Dark Souls. Landfall, the other dev who's sort of has become specialized in small co-op, fun multiplayer stuff like this. They also made content warning. And so, yeah, I follow Landfall. I've interviewed them, and they announced Pete a day or two before we came out. And I made a note, I was like, we need to keep an eye on this one because they just, they know this formula really well. And they also just make really great games. Yeah, I was really happy that Pete was that. It's very simple. Your four scouts, you know, crash land on an island. And, your job is just to climb up mountains and eventually escape by a helicopter.

And it has a lot of the same elements of repo. It's got proximity chat. It's got sudden disasters. It's got sort of resource management, right? It does have like road light elements. So it gets harder as it goes along. And if you fail, you have to start over. And yeah, I think my favorite part of Peek and why is like my favorite one of these this year is that it took this.

Lethal companies formulas, phasmophobia formula, we keep talking about, getting scared of their friends, and just said, like, we're just going to go a different direction with it. The important part is that you're with your friends, you're doing something difficult, but not too complex, like climbing. And it works extremely well. It's one, you need one button to know how to play this game. You hold left click to climb up.

You press space to jump, and the rest you just can pick up along the way. And it's a game full of making, like, interesting decisions. You have to climb up a cliff at first. It's really easy. And then you look up and you're like, okay, do I actually have enough stamina to make it to that next handhold? And it's really brilliantly designed in co-opt because you can hold right-click to help a friend up. So maybe you had enough stamina to get up the cliff, but they don't. You can help them out by like reaching down and sort of, you know, helping them up halfway.

Right. Yeah, there's the helping hand to move. And you can just kind of clutchly rescue someone as they're about to fall. when someone does fall, it's funny. And you can just hear their voice receding from you as they plummet. And also, they're not out of it, even if they can't climb up to the top, they can spectate, right? You turn into a ghost and you can watch and you can make fun of people or yourself. And then you sort of respond when they get to the top of the mountain.

So you're not, you're still involved, even if you're no longer climbing. And yeah, there's a whole genre of like endless climbers. and there's a genre of more in-depth climbing games or more challenging climbing games and there's something like getting over it or something like JuSaint, which I enjoy it last year, or the upcoming Cairn, you know, which are just a little more actual climbing simulation

as opposed to just boiling it down to a button. So, yeah, this is meant to be fun, but there's some strategy to it because there's a stamina bar, kind of like Breath of the Wild, and it depletes as you climb, but it's also part of one big, bar with your health, and so there are various resources you can manage and you can do it cooperatively,

and it's another one that benefits from playing people you like spending time with, hopefully. So, Simon, what's your takeaway from peak success? Yeah, I mean, I interviewed the devs about this and sort of did a, why was it popular? And I do think that it was a clever design innovation to do the kind of climbing button and have the, well, I mean, it is a little bit Zeldaish, but I don't think, you know, people necessarily thought, to put it in this type of game. And I suspect a lot of people playing don't even make the connection to Zelda.

It's just like an interesting way to get around. So, yeah, I like, and I do believe it was another kind of a couple of titles we're talking about, sometimes it's sort of like game jam type titles. So I think this was really, you know, the team of Landfall had the content warning sort of code base. And then they went and did a game jam

with the agro crab folks who did another crab's treasure. And this was sort of the output of it. And then they polished it up and put it out. So I think it's an interesting example of, you know, maybe nowadays it's more about if you have a really good, you know, platform, you can iterate a few of these ideas and put them out there

and sort of see what sticks with people, especially if they're inexpensive. I've been encouraging people, like I was speaking to someone the other week who's making a game in this genre and I was like, well, this is great. Would you think about trying to do five of them and putting them all on Steam and sort of seeing, you know, at least a theme page up?

And then see which ones people were attracted to because I think that's reasonable that it is. But I think this one, you know, good pedigree of the team, a really good execution. And it's just a lot of fun. Also, we haven't talked about this so much, but it's a lot of fun to watch people play it. This is one of the big reasons that these games do so well,

because you can watch kind of charismatic people play these games on YouTube or, you know, on TikTok, and you're having fun watching them, and you also aspire to play it. So I think that's a big reason why some of the virality is happening on this time. Yeah, that's one thing I want to. wanted to ask you about whether, yeah, that's one thing I wanted to ask you about whether games of this sort tend to be undercovered or at least less covered by traditional media or whether that's uniquely my failing here on this podcast. And if so, if they do tend to get a little less

press in the traditional outlets, how does word spread? And, you know, it reminds me of a conversation we have at the ringer in other areas of entertainment when you look at, say, the most popular television shows, for instance. They might be in a given year something like tracker on CBS or Ginny and Georgia on Netflix. And you look at the ratings and how many people are watching those shows and they're dwarfing all sorts of things that we're devoting a ton of prestige TV podcasts and articles to, right? And so then the question always becomes, are we underserving that market or is the market not there? Because for whatever reason, the people who are consuming this content don't want ancillary content.

They don't want to watch an episode of that show and then read a recap and read analysis. And maybe that's just their personal taste. Maybe it's a quality of that show, not to be derogatory, but not every show has as much depth to it. There may not be as much to analyze. Maybe it's something you put on in the background while you're doing other things. And so it's possible that these games that we're talking about are extremely popular and fun, but it's also appropriate that they should be covered a little less in that traditional way, just because there's a little less meat on the bone.

Maybe it's just, you know, we're talking today about why they're fun, but you might understand that instantly the second you pick it up, and maybe there's not all that much to chew on after that. So if you can parse all of that, Simon, and tell me how these things tend to get covered and how word tends to spread that would be. interesting to me. Yeah, and I think, yeah, I think all those points are very good. And I think it is, you know, these clearly attract more casual players. We have some data, you know, we survey random Steam players and we look at stuff like, you know, we anonymously survey them and we work out,

you know, like how many games are they got on their wish list, for example. So I just looked up peak while we were talking. And the median number of games wishlisted by someone who's, who's wishlisted peak, is only 61 games. That's 73% smaller than the median number of games under certain circumstances which we survey, which is 226 games. So the median person out there with a few restrictions we put on it has 226 games on their wishlets. So I think this really shows that these games are all casual.

It isn't like hardcore fans who are necessarily playing them all the time, and that's why they go so wide. And one of the reasons they go so wide is they are being spread on visual media, because they play very well on visual media where people enjoy seeing characters, you know, and their favorite streamers play stuff and sort of react to it and goof off and fall to their death in peak. So, yeah, so I definitely think, you know, something that game developers have had trouble with for a long time is how much should they make a sandbox and just allow a player agency to happen? And how much should they make a kind of tightly guided game? And often sandboxy kind of player agency first games play very well to a wider audience if you're watching. someone play it. And that's why some of these much more kind of sandboxy, sort of slightly

looser game design titles ended up going much more viral on the places where I think people do find about games on mass sometimes, which is visual media. Yeah. And you tend to see if you were critical reviews of these games. They may have many reviews from users on Steam, but less from the traditional games media outlets. And you might see them promoted via arrangements with streamers, with influencers who can get out the visuals and they just go viral on social media. And that works. And as you said, Morgan, maybe you're sort of leaning on some of your players who are more casual gamers to play.

And it's not hard to convince them to play a peak session every now and then. But those gamers aren't necessarily then craving a podcast about peak maybe after, you know, they're moving on to something else after they play, or at least that's what I tell myself. And so these games get underappreciated in some ways, because they are among the most popular games in the world and the games that people sunk the most time into this year, and that's an important metric of success. And there's clearly a quality here.

You could get some attention just for doing something sort of shocking and there's no meat on the bone, really. But these games were talking about that ascended to this level of virality had a good game under the hood, right? There was something that kept people coming back. And so, yeah, these games were. received a total of two nominations from the Game of Words, one of which has been withdrawn because it was Megabank getting an indie debut game nod. And then it turned out that the

developer of Megabonk said, actually, this is not my debut game. And therefore, I withdraw. So you may not get the hardware. You might not get the critical acclaim, but you will get many sales. And that probably makes up for it. And you get Morgan covering you at PC gamer. So that's something, at least. Yeah, we reviewed peak. We loved it, you know, but it is true that like,

you know, a lot of these games, they, you know, frankly don't need reviews because they, they've already proven that they're good

by the time we get to them. Right. That's due. Yeah, the critical gatekeepers. No one cares if it's covered on button mesh. They're going to play it regardless. Yeah,

like first of all, I don't think many people would, would read it if we reviewed every, if we waited like a month or to play enough of these games to review all of them. But, Like, you know, regardless, we still review lots of games every month. But yeah, like, and there's also just sometimes not that much to be said in subsequent coverage.

Like we've covered when peaked its updates, when people discover, you know, weird stuff in it, like when the devs were actually joining people's games and speaking it through the stuffed animal that you can carry around very strange. But, but yeah, they kind of speak for themselves, right? And then similar to the sitcoms and cable dramas that, like, outperforms the pleuribuses. of the world. Covering more of it doesn't necessarily mean more people, like everyone would show up to read it because they know what they're watching. We cover the more interesting art that prompts discussion. Yes, we've learned that lesson the hard way at times, but I will continue to cover Taylor Sheridan shows whether anyone listens or reads to what I say, because I'm watching.

All right, let's push past the halfway point and get to the aforementioned Megabunk. This episode is brought to you by Spectrum Business. Fast, reliable internet means everything for your business. And even this podcast, that's why I trust Spectrum Business. They keep companies of all sizes connected with internet, advanced Wi-Fi, phone, TV, mobile services, plus 24-7 U.S.-based support. Millions of business owners already trust Spectrum business. So visit Spectrum.com slash business to learn more.

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This was released on September 18th, for 999, developed and published by another solo developer. It goes by Vedinand. And this peaked at 117,336 players. And I said that these games we're talking about today were mostly not nominated for awards at the Game Awards, although Megabunk was initially. However, the most nominated game at the Game Awards, Claire Obscure, the CEO, and creative director of Claire Obscura Studio, Sanfall was asked last month for a personal game of the year pick

and said, I'm spending way too much time on Megabunk right now. It's my life. Help me. So can we just say vampire survivors but 3D? How else would you describe this, Morgan? Yeah, I mean, that really does say it. And, you know, it's a, I see some people call them hoard shooters, you know.

They're roadlights where there's not that much input. You move around. You get into the range of stuff you got to kill. but it's almost a more a game of evasion and managing your upgrades over time. It's like a risk of rain or that sort of thing if the upgrades sort of came to you and you were just sort of making smaller decisions

about how to level up. Yeah, I love, I mean, I like vampire survivors, but I love Megabont in a big way because it's 3D. It's got jumping, it's got platforming, it's got these much more interesting 3D environments that make that action of evasion way more interesting. And at the same time, it's also just got the stuff that these games have now.

You know, dozens of characters, dozens of weapons to unlock that just sort of spew out damage in different patterns and ways. And yeah, for me, this was a Steam Deck game. This was like a handheld game that was just pitch perfect for that type of play. And, yeah, like, there's, you know, I think the developer would be the first to admit,

like, it's just one of these. It's just a really good one. Yeah, right. And it's funny how once you develop that formula and establish how successful it can be. The spin that's required then to have a secondary breakout is often so elementary. You know, just it's a third dimension.

You can climb, you can jump. It's like it's 2025, not 1995, you know, we're blown away by 3D. But when you have that formula that works so well and then you give people a new wrinkle, oh, it's all, it feels fresh again. It feels like the first time. And yeah, you forgive certain things like it looking super,

perpixelated. That's intentional, really. And, you know, it launches with only two levels. And maybe that gets a little old, but you forgive it because you're paying 10 bucks, right? And it's fun. And it can also be quite challenging, but at least control-wise, it's not really, at least at first, because you're controlling your character, the movement, but then all the shooting, the offense is just happening automatically, essentially. You're just raining death upon everything that assails you. So what have learned from Megabunks, Simon? Well, firstly, I think it's interesting, you know, the dev, you know, Vedinad, allegedly, right?

There's all this stuff about, it's probably this guy, Danny Dev, right? And Danny Dev is a pretty viral historically, like game maker and YouTuber, who has this game called Carlson, which is meant to be coming out, but he's, I think, got stuck on it. And so he basically disappeared, and his fans are kind of mad at him. So he's come back and said one of his, if you look at his profile, it says one of his favorite game makers is Danny Dev, but he's like not, not fessing up. And I think that's one of the reasons why he got his, yeah, his name, his name taken off the game awards. But yeah, he's like really

good. It's a good example of like, I worry sometimes some people are like, well, this is just random. Like, this game was just randomly popular. I mean, I think if you look at this stuff, look at the heritage of the peak people. Like, they made really good game beforehand. And it's the same, you know, if this is Danny Dev, which I suspect it is, you know, he's previously had some free games on steam like I think like crab game and I think and a couple of others that have been that have been very popular and very well made and he's known for his kind of viral YouTube I'm going to make a game a bit like this game kind of kind of kind of joky thing so I think yeah real skill involved here and I do think the idea that it's 3D it has bosses as well I mean some other vampire survivors like

to have had bosses but you know certainly not all of them and it just has a real nice feeling kind of hook to it where there's a lot of interesting power-ups. It's just iterating in some ways on on the existing like hooks of vampire survivors likes. But the fact is, people really like them, people really like moving between them because they like the genre. You know, you don't want to be in a situation. Like, let's say, I told you I'm going to make a soccer management game.

You know, well, maybe it would be good timing because the current football managers made a bit of an error in upgrading and people don't like it so much. But in general, I would be like, well, you don't want to do that because there's a set of people who already play a certain soccer management game and they're not really likely to move. Whereas, you know, like for games like vampire survivors likes, people are very happy like these kind of lethal company likes to move around. And so I think that's one reason it's doing well. Yeah. And there's sort of a life cycle to these subgenres where one game pioneers it becomes a huge hit. And then it can be smart to piggyback on that. You know,

you think of games as art. And so the developers are following their muse. their heart's desire, what really speaks to them, but there's also a financial economic aspect to game development, and you need to get paid to keep doing it. And so people will sometimes follow the money to that initial success, and they'll, you know, sometimes it could be kind of a re-skin, essentially, and you're putting it out there and not doing all that much original. And maybe if the market's been sort of underserved, that will work for a while.

But after a while, there's a level of saturation where you need to bring something new to the table. And then maybe it runs its course where everyone's sort of sick of these survivors like and says we've seen this before. Okay, now we've done 2D, we've done 3D. There's no other D we can easily go to right now. And then maybe there's a lull or people move on to something else. And then perhaps absence makes the heart grow fonder. And there's a re-appreciation of that genre. So you sort of see that curve, I suppose, Simon, when one game hits big and then others try to follow it and copy it to a certain extent.

Yeah, I mean, honestly, the biggest trend I've seen of the last five years is people failing to understand that a new game is a genre. Like, it kind of blows my mind sometimes. There were not very, even vampire survivors, there was not really a very concerted attempt to follow that game. Because I think people, it doesn't occur to developers that it's sort of, it's now a genre. It's like, you know, like arcanoid, like breakout came out, right? And so, you know, breakout arcanoid. Brick Breakers is, it's not a very popular genre now days, but Brick Breakers is a genre, and it was birthed out of the game.

So I think if there's a lesson for developers here, like it is good to look at this, because I often also think of, you know, there's certain kind of checkpoint-based kind of games. You know, like Papers Please, pioneered the idea of a checkpoint-based, kind of, are you going to let someone go past something or not? It turns out, I think Papers Please is a genre, but I don't think most people were out.

and now there's been newer games like Contraband Police, which was like a first-person simulator slash Papers Please Mashup, that ended up doing very well. So I think that's one of my sort of, with my discovery hat on, I think it's interesting to think about that. Yeah, it's just like music or fashion or anything else in culture, taste change and ebb and flow and things come back into style.

Okay, let's get to our second to last game, Escape from Duckov. We talked about Escape from Tarkov on our last episode about Arc Raiders. That was one of the pioneering extraction shooters, which just finally got its somewhat problem-plagued 1.0 release. But this is not Escape from Tarkov. This is Escape from Dukov, which is a single-player, top-down PBE, Player versus Environment extraction shooter, released on October 16th for 1799, developed by Team Soda, which is an internal studio at the game's publisher, Billy, which is a Chinese publisher. and this one got up to

301,322 concurrent players. Morgan, take us through Escape from Duck of. Yes, this is the one I've played the least and it's so recent. I've been on other stuff, but like it's a surprise, like

it has the name that you think is going to be a joke. Like you think this is going to be like a five-minute ahas, I get the joke. But then you jump in and like, there's this surprisingly deep duck customization screen where you can attach various beat types and non-beats and feet and shoes and whatever you can make

like a pretty cool, absurd-looking character. Steam Workshop integration so you can create your own models or levels or whatever you want. And in no time, you're basically doing Tarkov single player. You're in a base that can be upgraded. You're taking risks about what equipment you take out into the map. And then you're, yeah, you're playing, stay from Tarkov from a top-down sort of dual-stick perspective so it's more accessible it's bit easier it's not so simulationy and it's also no other players it's a it's a purely single player game which is hard to tell before you really examine that steam page and it's good

it's just it's just simply good and you know this is this has been an interesting one for us to cover because obviously we saw how popular it was getting whatever it was like oh okay we've you know we've had someone playing this for a bit we didn't expect it to to break out this way especially and then i think we know we try we did a little coverage and we're like, oh, okay, not a ton of readership on it. And then we're, you know, looking at the players, we're thinking like, okay, this might just be one of those games that just primarily is interesting to Chinese players. And, you know, we can kind of look at the numbers and see like, oh, yeah, it's peaking all the, you know, its impressive CCUs are all during

active Chinese hours and not so much in the West. I'm sure Simon will touch on that more. So, like, I find it interesting that China continues to like really, like, has figured out what Western games can do well too, or make games that sort of look like Western. You just assume, like, oh, this is either made in Europe or here. And this is, you know, something that's for us. And then you examine, you're like, oh, this is made by Chinese YouTube, published by Chinese YouTube, basically, and made primarily for that audience. It's wild.

Yeah, I was going to, I had, that was like my number one thing to add. Like, we have data certainly extrapolated from user profiles, and this does seem to be 70% Chinese players. And that really is quite a high percentage. That's, you know, 7% US. But I think that really does show that, you know, we forget sometimes that, like most of the other games we cover today have not had

a ton of Chinese players. Interesting. They've been pretty just worldwide popular. But this one, I think, is the one that was just very popular in China. I'm sure it helps if, you know, one of the big streaming services in China publishes the game. I can't imagine that hurts their streaming

viewership. But, yeah, Yeah, I think it's real interesting, but it's still very understandable and playable in the West. It's just, I think, a lot of his interest was in China. And that is interesting from the point of view of, I mean, we don't have to get into it now, but, like, you know, the Chinese sort of semi-legality of steam makes it quite interesting that games can go so hot even when, you know, this game made by a Chinese studio has not been government-approved in China, but they just sort of will publish it anyway. Yeah.

And I guess it has that initial kind of jockey appeal, almost a pal world. Pokemon with guns. It's ducks with guns. Oh, that sounds cute and charming. And then you play it. And there is actually a lot of game there. And it's pretty polished and there are no microtransactions. And also it seemed like something where the extraction shooter genre, and we talked about

this a bit last time when we talked about Arc Raiders, but there was clearly some latent potential there that hadn't really broken out that it felt like no one had completely nailed that formula. And I guess with Tarkov, there was no PVE for a long time, at least. That was something that people wanted. And so if you deliver that, and maybe it's just that escape from Duckov and arc Raiders kind of came along at roughly the same time and managed to make that accessible and develop that concept into something that was more mainstream, even if it looked like ducks and it seems sort of silly, there's actual depth in a compelling loop there. And so appearances can be deceiving sometimes, it turns out. And clearly this has been

a huge hit. So it just, it feels like the moment when the extraction shooter was really ready for its breakout, ready for its close-up. And maybe it happened in a two-pronged fashion with ducks and also robot drones. Yeah. And there has been a history, like probably a lack of extractiony stuff in kind of 2D or top down. There was one game Zero Sievert, I believe, which Zero Seavit did pretty good. And I will surprise people aren't doing more like alternate perspective extraction games. There's no reason why extraction games have to be, you know, first person or behind view or whatever. So I think, you know, maybe this will encourage people to do more alternate.

I mean, you could do a pixel art, like a cute pixel art extraction game. But I don't know anyone's going to try that. But there's no reason why you couldn't. It's a million dollar idea you just had there, Simon. and you're giving it away for free. So I assume that based on where this is being played and the difference in genre, that there's probably less overlap

with some of the other games that we've talked about today for Escape from Duckov. Do you know what other games Escape from Duckoff players have tended to play? I just looked, and now I'm laughing, conspicuously into the bike, because the top by overlap, like, this is top overlap with more than five times more likely than the average player. It's Black Myth, Wukong. Well, that makes sense.

Yeah, which is played by 51% of Darkoff players and only 8.75% of the audience. I mean, underneath that, there's like Slater Spire, Proteto, Dead Cells, Dave the Diver, Oxygen, not included. So there's sort of some vibes there. I mean, the sort of, yeah, the well-done, long-played kind of, you know, Vampires Survivors like quality indie games. But, yeah, I think there's several titles in the top ten here, which are quite shy and specific. Well, we have reached our last game in the most recent to join. in the club. RV, there yet. This is a play on words, RV, as in the vehicle. A co-op adventure game released on October 21st for 799. This was developed and published by Nuggets Entertainment,

and this is one where the individual user count actually does matter, because this just barely scraped across our 100K threshold with 100,0002 CCU. So Morgan, I don't know if you've had much time in an RV at this point, but can you break this one down for us? Yeah, I finished it just last week with some friends. You know, you're going to hear some similarities. It's got proximity chats, got both-player co-op. It has sudden disasters and things to overcome. Like Simon says, people want to move between these games

because they're small investments and there's a lot of meat on the bone. But this one, yeah, I also really enjoyed this one for its left turn, like quite literally. One of the players has to, the whole goal is to drive at RV across the, this absurd national park as like a long, long detour around this highway that's closed or as a rock rock slide. And yeah, at first you're just doing stuff like, oh, how are we going to cross this tiny gap? I guess we'll put some planes down and drive the RV over that. And then it eventually becomes like launching off ramps, activating elevators, avoiding alligators, stuff like that. And yeah, it sort of recontextextualizes the friend co-op into like different rules. So like,

you know, anyone can drive, but only one person can drive at a time. And when you're in that RV, you have this, like, insanely obstructive view where, like, you can barely even see, you know, like you're on a raised truck or in a regular RV. You can't see what's in front of you. So you need people to come out and there's commands to, like, put your hands up and, like, wave people left and right, you know, tell them, you're good, you're good, you're at all that stuff. People really love being able to simulate just little weird parts of life like that in a co-op context. And it's really fun.

Yeah, it reminds me almost of a Star Trek bridge crew or something like that. You have assigned roles, right? So you're not quite the captain, but you're the driver or you're working the winch or you're putting out fires or fending off wildlife or whatever it is. And this is also physics based with kind of janky physics sometimes, but in a fun way. And you just end up with a good story usually, whether it goes badly or it goes well, something detours you and derails you along the way. And so it's funny. It's another one that's good for streamers. It's not going to take a super long time to play,

and there's going to be something funny and amusing that happens. And another one where it doesn't ship with a ton of content, right? There's only one map at first, but a lot of different permutations of the playthrough of that map. And it's not as fun or as feasible solo, because you're just running around trying to do everything yourself, and maybe there's a little less replay value. But yeah, if you have friends,

You know, not having friends is a real obstacle to enjoying some of these games. And also, I guess, life in general, probably, depending on the person. So, Simon, you're seeing a lot of overlap with some of the earlier games we discussed with the RV there yet audience? Yeah, I mean, top, top, top, overlap more than five or so as likely as peak repo and Schedule I. But if you go further down here, there is some other stuff I thought was interesting. It's a little bit more casual even than some of those games. So we have chained together in there. We have supermarket together, which is a supermarket simulator co-op.

And we have golf with your friends as well. And golf with your friends is a very typical kind of hangout kind of game. So, yeah. So I think you're saying some different stuff in here. But a lot of this is, you know, I've been talking for a while now on my newsletter about how important co-op has become because it's just such a good way to attract people in a much more, you know, in this very fragmented world. if you do get a lot of people telling their friends they want to play something,

it actually has really nice incremental virality, especially because co-op is, you know, you can just play with one other person and you have these other games that are like 5V5 PVP, then you have to find, you know, four of the very aggressive people and go up against the crew of a whole bunch. It's just so much more difficult.

And like, co-op is just great because the atomic unit of expansion is, like, pretty low and you can sort of get gradual viral effects, which is what a lot of these games, I think, ended up getting. So I think that's one reason why we're seeing a lot of these games in the top titles. So that overlap and that transferability, that suggests that there's staying power at least for the genre or at least for this type of experience that you don't get sick of having a co-op hang with friends, friend slop if you want to be dismissive kind of vibesy experience.

If you tire of one, you move on to the next and your enthusiasm is renewed. But what's the typical pattern that we see with a single game. What's the usual progression when it comes to the shelf life or the decline curve of a game that breaks out like these did? Well, I'm looking at repo right now, because I think that's had one of the better effects. And really, repo started out, you know, first few days, 10,000 CCU. It peaked at, yeah, 220,000 CC or so about, I think, a month after it came out. Yeah. And then it's just gradually slid down and it didn't really have, I think any major patches until it was down, it's down at about like 15 or 20,000 CCU,

which is still quite a lot. I mean, considering they're quite, you know, small play times, that's probably, I don't know, we have some DAU estimates in here. You know, that's still 250,000 players a day.

So it's like 10% of its peak, but it's still 250,000 players a day. And then it just hit, I think, an update very recently, and it went back up to a, or whether, like, 170,000 CCE a year.

and now it's coming down again. So I think in the best situation, you do, you know, you do keep going for a long time. You'll sometimes see these kind of less salubrious websites have all these headlines. You know, oh my God, this game's only at 30% of its top CCU. It's a disaster. But, you know, I think that like most games get to fractions of their CCU. So I think, you know, when you're peaking this high, you can still do well. I think some lose interest completely over time.

But certainly I notice repos, I think, doing. better than the average. Yeah, I always sort of side-eye those headlines, especially when they're about a single-player primarily game. And it's like, well, yeah, that's what happens. You play the game, and then you move on to something else. So, of course, the player count would decline precipitously, but it does vary. I mean, I was thinking about a game like Frag Punk, which I excluded from our list here just because it was free, but it did cross the 100K-C-C-U barrier about eight months ago. And in the past 24 hours, as we speak, it's under 2,000. So, you know, that's a, a pretty steep decline, whereas you look at something like peak, which peaked at about 170,000

CCU. And in the past 24 hours, it's at 44,000. That's, you know, more than a quarter of its peak five months on. So clearly there's something that is either finding new people or keeping the same people coming back here. So yeah, you're always going to see a steep fall off, but the steepness varies. You know, peak, despite what happens in the game peak, it has not fallen off quite as much. Yeah, we're also talking about two games in Peak and repo that just recently got big updates with, you know, new maps, new stuff to do. Like, that always, you know, surges people back, but it's like, I don't really care, like,

how many players repo has, like a year from now because, like, that is a game that will always be able to load up with friends and enjoy. Like, it's just successful, right? but I'll be happy if they just keep adding more to both of those games and give me a reason to keep it installed, you know, for Friday night. Yeah, and I'm looking at peak right now because like before it's patched because I have that data up. And yeah, it got down to about 12, 13,000 CCU. But that's still, to your point, compared to Phragpunk as a percentage, that's still way higher. So I think you're absolutely correct that like some stuff is a bit more faddy when people just fall off.

I think some of these games have sold really well. The reason they sold really well is they do have a good hook, and so I think they're less likely to fall off the cliff. Is there anything we can say about the typical profile of a person who plays these games? Obviously, it's going to vary, and some will be big in China, and some won't be. But in terms of age, demographics, gaming habits, as Morgan was saying, you know, maybe there's a casual element to this. Is it primarily PC-only players?

Is it people who are playing mobile games too? What have you learned about what sends a game to these viral heights or who does? Yeah, I mean, it's actually oddly quite under research because we know a lot about people's Steam profiles, but we don't always know about the person. We actually have a plan at Game DiscoverCo where we're going to give out Steam Keys to people and say, in exchange for Steam Keys, would you mind telling us a bit about yourself? Because right now, yeah, you can see someone's Steam profile, but it's really difficult to tell other than their country, but like, you know, what they're doing, where they're from.

What we can do is look at people's catalogues. And I would say, like I said, some of these games, definitely those players have less games wishlisted and played than the average. So it does imply to me that they're slightly younger, slightly more casual players on average. You know, as regards to what else they play, that is a little bit more difficult to work out. But I think it is very much the kind of PC audience

who maybe plays some mobile stuff as well. It's not the console, the console hardcore. Well, the console hardcore is interested in games like this, but the console hardcore, I would stereotype a bit more as kind of a, you know, like Rainbow 6y, kind of battlefield-y kind of audience. They're a little bit more serious in their shooting than some of this. So that's sort of my stereotypical view. But yeah, the answer is actually exactly who the people are is a little under research by us

and by others. So hopefully people will have a chance to do that in the future. Yes. It's too serious for ducks. Get the ducks out of my shooters. So I also wondered how efficient the market is at elevating games with this sort of audience ceiling and put aside all the games in various states of development that may or may not actually come to fruition and be released in some form. But just talking about that 20,000 games that came out on Steam or even the 4,000 plus games that found some sort of audience, are there games out there that could have gone this big that just got overlooked for some reason because they happened? to come out at the same time as some other big game,

or they didn't have the marketing or whatever it was, but if they had somehow gotten in front of people, they would have liked them and played them just as much as these six that we discussed. That's a really difficult question, because to some extent what's happening is we are discussing the games that had the correct genres for virality, if you see what I mean.

So ultimately, there's a lot of great games in other genres that have trouble scaling, because there's no way for people to find out about them because they won't be discussed, played constantly by YouTube. So there's definitely a weird situation here where Jean was starting to sort of self-select virality and therefore for success.

So I don't love that because often it means there's great games, you know, I'm sure Morgan sees this as well, that great games that sell like 5,000 copies that just can't get the word out because they have no real way to do so. And so that's just where we are with the amount of games we have out of it. And you have found, correct me if I'm wrong, that unless you're in the same genre as another huge game

that's coming out at the same time, this is always an issue if there's a surprise drop, if Silk Song comes out and you happen to have a Metroidvania that looks sort of like Silk Song, and it was coming out at the same time. In that case, everyone scrambles out of the way, and maybe it makes sense. but if there's not as much overlap in the genre or the potential player base, you've found that it's not necessarily the kiss of death to come out around that window, right?

Yeah, I think this is something where people who haven't done so well, unfortunately, or even people who have done well, would always like to ascribe it to something. So they'd like to be, we were in the right place at the right time, and we were completely in the wrong place. We would have done so much better if we'd been the next week. But from what we've seen, we know someone actually who did some research into this based on CCUs for existing games, you know,

to see if people moved around. And what they found was when a really big game in a particular subgenre came out, the only people that moved were definitely, yeah, very direct. It was like medieval strategy games with a certain subgenre.

Those people moved to the new game. Everyone else just kept playing. So I definitely think it's very difficult to visualize the tremendously large amount of parallel audiences you have for games, but that is just a thing. Everyone has their own list of stuff they want.

And very rarely is in a situation where people are like, well, I'm just not ever going to buy this game because another game coming out the same week. I just don't think that happens. Yeah, people are anchored to their tastes and their rotations and their old favorites that they keep in their rotation. The last thing I want to throw out to you too, because a discussion of high-CCU games

that we haven't really covered on the podcast this year would be incomplete if we did not at least allude to some of the other huge platforms, we have not talked about Fortnite and we have not talked about Roblox, which of course have become platforms on their own and now host mega viral, massively popular games. Most notably this year, probably grow a garden and steal a brain rot inside of Roblox, which surpassed Fortnite, surpassed everything in at least fleeting popularity and exceeded 20 million concurrent users. We're talking about hundreds of thousands today. This is orders of magnitude larger than that even. So what have we learned about that other than the fact that people are now trying

to make movies out of these things, which seems like a large leap, but when I think it's this popular and thus recognizable, you're going to try to capitalize on that popularity. What have we learned about, I guess, the dominance of those games as platforms, not only the stock experience of Fortnite and Minecraft and Roblox to kind of lump them all together, but games developed within them and the experiences that grow a garden and steal a brain rot specifically provided. Roblox is fascinating to watch from a distance. You won't find many journalists or even industry folks who like play it, obviously, because it really has become like a children's space and kind of a scary one for many reasons socially. In the same way, some of the biggest YouTube

channels you've never heard of are producing children slop, like in the real use of that word. That is kind of where Roblox occupies. Obviously, it's extremely appealing. But I guess I see it as like, we see a lot of chatter about how Fortnite and Roblox are kind of like a threat to the wider hobby. Because more and more people are just staying on those games. I also think those games are just created a lot of new gamers that don't really play other stuff. And, you know, that's not backed up by numbers. Simon, feel free to refute that. And that, like, gaming is just such a, such a hugeer hobby than it was even 10 or 15 years ago.

That, like, yeah, we're now seeing a new sector that probably needs some oversight where we can, or, like, you can just really exploit, you know, show the standard of children's tastes to, to, yeah, become the biggest game in the world because, yeah, there were tens of millions of children that are happy to play the free Roblox. And, yeah, I'm sure there's plenty of teens and even some adults in there too that maybe shouldn't be in there, or maybe they're normal.

Well, I was going to say, yeah, I think Roblox is such an interesting space. I think, yeah, it's been a very kid-first space, but kids are growing up in it now, to your point, Morgan, because, you know, like, you could play Roblox, what, like 14 years ago? So some people who were playing back, then are in their 20s now. And I think also Roblox is growing

more obvious game genres. Like there's a game called 99 Knights in the Forest, which is very big on Roblox right now. And that title is definitely like survival crafty. You know, it's not a million miles away from survival craft games that you might play on Steam or elsewhere. You know,

definitely some of the games historically have been like, you just turn up and there's like a big city with a bunch of people and you run around in a car and like type of people. And I think that's the typical. kind of, you know, slightly sloppy, like, Voblox stuff we're used to, but I definitely think what's interesting about the space, and we're trying to cover it more. We don't do any data, actually, for Game Discover Code,

but we are trying to cover it in our newsletter. We have a monthly chart from the third party running now, because it's very under-discussed. And, yeah, I think there's some interesting stuff happening there. Some of it is, yeah, like messy and sort of IP stealing adjacent. Like there's a lot of anime games that are secretly about particular anime, but don't have the name of that anime in them and all kinds of sketchy stuff like that. But yeah, I mean, a lot of people play.

I think the tools in it are getting more complicated. I think Roblox has kind of tried to have more and more game-like experiences in it. So I think it's definitely something that we all want to keep an eye on. And a lot of it plays very well with YouTube, but certainly the whole Steeler BrainRot kind of thing. I've checked out some of those videos, and, you know, everyone is going, look, I have this cage with my most important brainwops in them. Oh, no, it's open.

Someone's stolen them. I'm going to run off. I mean, it's like, it's kind of, but it's also kind of, it's, you know, it's, it's reasonably entertaining. I understand why kids and teens are into it. So, yeah, I think, I think the conventional games industry doesn't talk enough about it, but I also think that it's quite difficult to get your brain around. Yeah.

And I guess the question then becomes, as those Robox kids, get older, do they stay in Roblox and keep playing the same things? Do new experiences develop within Roblox to cater to maybe a more mature taste? Or do they then graduate? I guess that sounds judgmental, but move to more traditional games. Do they suddenly start playing the sort of steam games we're talking about? Or even more sort of quote unquote hardcore gamer games, we'll find out, I guess. But obviously those companies want to keep them within their wild gardens. And, you know, there's a lot of crossover, I guess, with internet meme culture when it comes to steal a brain rot, of course, which is based on a meme. Same thing with Megabank. There's a lot of

just internet humor, right? Self-referential, almost knowing, winking maybe, but no wonder it appeals to people who are seeing it on social media, et cetera. Okay, well, apologies to everything we didn't cover, which is also a long list. For example, rematch, which just came up short of of our CC cut off, although that was Steve Allman's Ringaverse Recommends pick back in June or Ball Pit, which was Matt James' pick in October, as well as some of the free Steam sensations we skipped over today, such as Idol game Bongo Cat, or Where Wins Meet, or Skate, or Mecca Break, or Shadowverse Worlds Beyond, or the aforementioned Frag Punk. However deep we dig, it's just a bottomless pit. It's like the whole digging game that,

I invoked in my intro, you can never get to the end of all of the games on Steam. Morgan, thank you so much for being here. We needed a dedicated PC gamer and we're better to go than to PC gamer itself. Anything you'd care to plug? I mean, yeah, read PCgamer.com. Make us, make us, you know, your news destination for the day. We still cover the hobby very well. We cover most games our PC games, so we end up covering most of gaming.

It really is a pleasant home page to visit. and read stuff. Yeah. And even as primarily a console gamer these days, I will acknowledge that the growth is on PC. And we've been talking about a lot of the reasons for that today. You can find much more info about everything that we've been discussing and more from Game Discoverco at unsurprisingly,

gamedescover.com. And you can subscribe to the Game Discoverco newsletter as I do at newsletter. Dotgamer.com. Thank you so much, Simon. Thank you. Awesome. You outsource my plugging to yourself. Yes, I did it for you. I appreciate that. Yeah, no, it's always interesting to talk about this stuff, and I appreciate the company to do so. I think there's just, yeah, so much going on in the space and so difficult to keep up. So it's really good to just have a little look back as we get towards the end of the year. Yeah, one podcast can't possibly cover it, but we've made up for our negligence as best we can here. Thanks to Devin Milano for producing this episode

and to Arjuna Ramgo Pal for additional production support. Stay tuned this Thanksgiving week for Ringiverse recommends for November, A Midnight Boys White Women Movie Draft, and Mint Edition on Zootopia 2 and Disney sequels, plus House of Our episodes on the best fights of the Century so far and Stranger Things Season 5, Volume 1, Part 1. But Mesh will be back in December with coverage of Marvel Cosmic Invasion. Metroid Prime 4, Five Nights at Freddy's 2, the Game Awards,

our own Games of the Year, and Fallout Season 2. And really, who know is what else? Because we can't anticipate what will be the next major story. You can contact us at RingiverseGaming at gmail.com. And until next time, keep an eye on those steam charts because even Simon Carlos can't perfectly predict what will go viral next. Feels like every product claims real protein these days. But real doesn't start.

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