Sons Of The Forest is maybe so popular that it crashed Steam

23 Feb 2023

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265k+ people want to be murdered by cannibals

A masked maniac takes a swing at you in Sons Of The Forest.

As I write this, Sons Of The Forest is the third most played game on Steam with 265,000 concurrent players. That's not bad for a game that came out a little over three hours ago. It's so popular in fact, it might have crashed Steam.

Sons Of The Forest was due to launch this evening at 5pm GMT, but it ended up going a little later than that. Its launch instead coincided with a rare period of Steam downtime. You can see the spike of reported outages at Downdetector. 265,000 people trying to simultaneously download and start playing a new game might have been enough to see even Valve's servers fall down.

If you're not aware of it, Sons Of The Forest is a first-person survival game and a sequel to The Forest. Like its predecessor, it's about surviving in a jungle environment, optionally with the aid of pals, while semi-naked cannibals do their best to disrupt your progress.

Sons Of The Forest had also initially intended to launch this year as a complete game, but instead has followed in its predecessors footsteps as an Early Access release.

We'll have a lot more to say about the flashy survival sim in the coming days, but hey, it's exciting that what's effectively an indie game has launched to such huge immediate success. You'll find it on Steam for £25/$30 if you want to join the masses.

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