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.
