It’s barely January and we’re already writing a completely weird headline, so let’s try to contextualize what’s happening here. This is a story about Goose Goose Duck, a multiplayer deceive-em-up from Ontario-based Gaggle Studios that shares a lot of bones with the wildly popular game Among Us (which itself was video gaming’s breakout hit in a very, very long line of social deduction games). The game pits four players who are geese that have roles and objectives against two hidden mallards that are out to sabotage them, and further offers additional selectable sub-roles and extra modes like Draft, Trick or Treat, Dine & Dash, and Goose Hunt.
While most would probably pass GGD as a mere copycat, it has seen a significant surge in popularity, rocketing to the third most-played game on Steam and seeing a big enough influx of players that the servers died earlier in the week. And the devs likely have K-pop behemoth BTS to thank.
This past November saw one of BTS’s performers begin streaming the game to fans, which in turn saw its concurrent player head count surge from 6,000 in mid-November to almost 130K in December. At the time of this writing, the title is sitting at a new all-time concurrency of nearly 600K.
While much of the game’s popularity does appear to be centered in Korea based on playtime peak hours, the game has received its fair share of positive Steam user reviews on our side of the globe, sitting at a “Very Positive” total score. One review even went so far as to say it’s better than Among Us.
