Gaming Thots

[olivermoss]

One of the biggest games right now is an indie horror game made by a solo dev, Lethal Company was for a time top of the Steam sales charts. It's hit metrics that would be respectable for a AAA title. On one hand it's a horror co-op game with janky mechanics and opportunities for hilarity. Co-op horror is popular and this is a great platform for influencer shenanigans, but also lots of games all want to be that.

Lethal Company is also a game about being in a capitalist dystopia that destroyed not just the world, but every world and every moon. There is nothing left but scraps to scavenge for and a glimpses of what life was like before the collapse. Workers are literally disposable. That is striking a chord.

I have zero interest in playing it and get bored watching it. Janky mechanics = hilarity is not my thing. But it's a very interesting phenomenon, especially since such a big satisfaction point for players is deciding to hold back salvage from the company, even though that can mean not hitting quota.

Comments

[mistressofmuses]

I haven't heard of this one (despite the apparent popularity!)

It'd probably not be much to my liking (as I'm also not big on jank=humor) but the background premise IS one that's a little too relatable, haha.

[olivermoss]

It only came out recently and I don't think it started to hit big benchmarks until mid December. I was aware of it, but not how big it was until I saw headlines about it outselling COD for a bit. Yeah, I have no interest it in but how it's hitting is interesting.

And, being an online game, that a solo dev can scale up server space for 100k concurrent says interesting things about the tools out there.

[mistressofmuses]

That's a huge spike in popularity, so that's cool for them to have that runaway success.

That does say something very interesting about what tools are available, and how much things *can* scale.