Goose Goose Duck is a viral hit on Steam, thanks to BTS member V

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-to play social deduction game was No. It was the No.3 most-played Steam game on Thursday. The peak reached 563,677 users and pushed past Steam favourites like Battlegrounds in the PUBG Game, Modern Warfare 2 – Call of DutyAnd Apex Legends.

What is driving this? Goose Goose Duck’s surge in popularity? Gaggle.fun developers Goose Goose DuckYou can, however, thank Korean pop giant BTS.

Goose Goose DuckIt was first released on October 20, 21 after an Early Access launch six years earlier. According to Steamcharts data, the social deduction game in which players play the role of ducks or other birds trying to find the masking bird among them had only a handful of thousand users per day. It reached its peak in February with 21362 players.

But in November of last year, V from BTS — real name Kim Taehyung — started streaming Goose Goose DuckTo fans via the social app Weverse and on the web platform Weverse. (He streamed the event). For the Fall GuysAnd There are many of us.) Almost immediately, Goose Goose DuckIt quickly became a huge hit. The peak concurrent player numbers grew from 6,000 in November to almost 130,000 a month later. The game’s peak player numbers tripled by the end of the year.

Gaggle.fun was overwhelmed by this success and posted approximately a Goose Goose DuckServer outage Jan. 2 due to mass influx 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. 250k more players than our existing large player base is too much. We’re working on increasing capacity as fast as we can and will keep everyone updated. We apologize for the inconvenience, we’re all working hard to make sure everyone can play.”

Goose Goose Duck’s largest player base appears to, unsurprisingly, be centralized in Asia. According to Steamcharts data, players numbers rise in the evenings of Korea and fall in North America during the day. Twitch has only few hundred users at this time.

And so on Goose Goose DuckIs it possible to see gameplay or aesthetic direction? There are many of us, the game seems to be following its lead in another way: by becoming an “overnight” success long after its debut, thanks to a popular streamer. With BTS currently on hiatus, hopefully the hitmakers of Korea’s biggest pop band can help other obscure games find a new audience.