If you'd asked me a couple weeks ago, I'd have said the extraction shooter craze was starting to slow down. The last few days have proved how wrong I'd have been. Over the weekend, as metric boatloads of players swarmed the Arc Raiders server slam, a singleplayer extraction shooter was drawing its own crowds: Escape From Duckov, a top-down game of looting and shooting with warfighting waterfowl that sold more than 500,000 Steam copies in its first 72 hours.
"What an exciting weekend for all ducks! More than 500,000 Ducklings have now joined the world of Duckov! At this moment, the entire dev team is quacking with joy and flapping our wings in excitement," Duckov developer Team Soda said in a Steam news post announcing the successful launch figure. "A heartfelt thank-you to every single Duckling for your incredible support—together, we've reached this truly meaningful Duckov milestone! We'll keep working hard to make sure every update lives up to your expectations!"
Just three hours before time of writing, Escape From Duckov reached a peak Steam player count of 182,000—nearing the Arc Raiders playtest's weekend concurrent peak of 189,000. That's notable for a few reasons. One: it's ducks. Two: Unlike Arc Raiders, Duckov—developed by an internal gamedev studio of Chinese media platform Bilibili—is a singleplayer game, which doesn't often lend itself to high concurrent player counts.
Speaking as someone who prefers to scrounge for loot without the looming threat of PvP combat, I'm getting a lot of encouraging signs here. One of those signs being how a duck looks surprisingly adorable while holding an assault rifle.
Judging from Steam reviews, all that attention is translating into an extremely positive player response. Duckov's already sitting at an Overwhelmingly Positive review rating, with a 95% positivity rate after more than 6,200 reviews.
Unsurprisingly, considering Duckov is a game developed and published by a major Chinese company, over 4,400 of those reviews are from Steam users using Simplified Chinese. But at time of writing, English reviewers are actually slightly more positive than reviewers worldwide, with 96% of the 890 English-language reviews coming in as positive compared to 94% of Chinese reviewers.
If you're hoping to face other player-controlled ducks in combat, however, you'll have to look somewhere else—like Duckside, a duck-themed Rust-like that's apparently existed for over a year. Or the much-loved 2015 side-scrolling multiplayer shooter Duck Game. We've been doing ducks with guns for a while, it turns out.
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