Party Animals, a forthcoming multiplayer game from Recreate Games, had more than 113,000 concurrent players on its fourth free trial day on Steam, breaking the previous record set by a Chinese game on the digital distribution platform.
A demo of the game in which players take on the roles of puppies, kittens, sharks, dinosaurs, and other fuzzy creatures to battle friends was available from October 4 to 13. Following the success of Among Us and Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout, Party Animals seems on track to be the next party game smash.
According to its mission statement, Recreate Games, owned by Source Technology, aims to create the next generation of immersive games. The immediate success of Party Animals seems to be linked to the coronavirus lockdown, which has many gamers longing for social interaction.
“Party Animals builds and innovates on the same concepts that led to the global success of games such as Gang Beasts, Human Fall Flat and more recently Fall Guys,” said Daniel Ahmad, senior analyst at game consultancy firm Niko Partners. “Recreate Games has created a physics-based, multiplayer brawler that is fun to play, includes social and competitive elements, and is streamer friendly.”
Party Animals broke the record set by The Scroll Of Taiwu, an indie role-playing game, in September 2018 when the game ranked second in Steam's global sales charts. The new game has also been a hit on Twitch, with more than 113,000 viewers watching a livestream of it last Friday.
Given the success of the game, Recreate Games now plans to develop a smartphone version of Party Animals. Ahmad says that Chinese developers are increasingly looking to develop games, such as Mihoyo's Genshin Impact, that have universal appeal. Through Steam, PC games like Lost Castle, Bright Memory, and My Time At Portia have managed to find global success in spite of Chinese regulations and censorship.
Some experts, however, remain skeptical about the long-term success of games like Party Animals. “[Party] games tend to have a short lifespan. You can see that Fall Guys is already losing popularity. So launching it on mobile can maximise revenue,” said Liao Xuhua, gaming analyst at Beijing-based Analysys International. Xuhua went on to note that physics simulation games do appear to be trending. “We have been seeing no shortage of physics-simulation-based party games of late, which were not very common before the success of Human Fall Flat," Xuhua said.
Source: The Star