Escape From Duckov is the latest breakout Steam hit to owe its success to China
This week on Steam's top-played charts, the two new releases going neck-and-neck are Battlefield 6—no surprise there—and a top-down extraction shooter about ducks. Specifically, it's about shooting ducks as a duck. Normally my friend group would be buzzing about the meme game of the week, but it feels like I don't know anyone outside the PCG team who's actually playing Escape From Duckov.
Turns out it's mostly popular in China, which is becoming more and more common on Steam—but it's still a total upset of the usual trending game pattern, because Duckov is a singleplayer game with an $18 price tag.
Since its launch this week, most of Escape From Duckov's players are in China: You can clearly spot that its player count (via Steam.db) spikes in the evenings for China's timezone (about half its peak count happening at 10pm Pacific) and that 64% of its user reviews on Steam are in Chinese. It's not uncommon for games to have a huge audience in a different market, but when Chinese players rocket a new release to the top of the charts it's usually a free-to-play online game.
Steam mainstay Naraka Bladepoint still tops 100,000 daily players when China is online and then plummets to fewer than 10,000 players overnight. It has 245,000 Simplified Chinese reviews, but only 23,000 in English. Delta Force, released in late 2024 from Chinese developer Team Jade, has a more global playerbase, but still spikes to its daily peaks when Chinese players are online in their evenings.
Even in the English-speaking market, new releases that manage to break into the top five concurrent player counts on Steam this year have either been major online launches like Battlefield 6 and Borderlands 4 or the growing trend of relatively cheap multiplayer goofing off games like REPO.
It's surprising to see a $18 singleplayer game come out of nowhere and celebrate a million sales in its first week.
This isn't exactly some little guy indie game though, despite looking like one. Escape from Duckov is published by Bilibili, a Chinese livestreaming platform similar to Twitch. So it's safe to assume that Duckov's got a bit of a promotional leg up in China that propelled it into the stratosphere.
Regardless, Duckov's just plain good. It's definitely more than just a meme game, as my colleague Lincoln Carpenter put it. I'm not typically a top-down shooter (or any shooter) enjoyer myself, but I do enjoy a bit of looting and crafting and Duckov has been reeling me in for a few runs every evening this week. I just want to see it start getting popular with people I can actually talk to about it.