Lethal Company, new hit made by solo dev, peaks at 57k concurrent players with estimated sales of over 640k copies
Lethal Company, a co-op horror scavenging game from solo dev Zeekerss, is taking Steam by storm. Thanks to its fun core gameplay, it has already attracted hundreds of thousands of players, making it another strong indie hit this year.
As we reported earlier this week, Lethal Company ranked 8th on Steam’s global top sellers chart for the week of November 7-14. It was also the fourth highest-grossing premium game on the platform, behind only Baldur’s Gate 3, Risk of Rain Returns, and Call of Duty.
According to SteamDB, Lethal Company has already peaked at 57,564 concurrent players, and the count is still growing. Note that not every AAA game with much larger budgets and marketing costs can boast such numbers.
The game’s base price is $10. In the latest GameDiscoverCo newsletter, Simon Carless estimated its sales at 642,000 units, with a projected gross revenue of $5.7 million. This is really impressive given that Lethal Company was made by solo dev Zeekerss, who used to create UGC experiences for Roblox.
“Many times throughout development I was unsure if what I was making would turn out to be a confusing, broken mess of wasted months of effort, and I even wondered if recording the whole process would somehow ruin it (as it often does),” he said in a blog post on Steam. “But this has been one of the most fulfilling projects I’ve ever worked on, requiring friends and faith and humor.”
Lethal Company currently has an “Overwhelmingly Positive” rating on Steam, with 97% of the 12,595 user reviews being positive. However, it had poor coverage from the mainstream press prior to its launch, and there are zero reviews for it on Metacritic.
So this is the case we previously saw with other viral indie hits developed by small teams, including Phasmophobia, Among Us, Dread Hunger, or BattleBit Remastered. The media rarely pay attention to such games early on due to their lo-fi graphics or other elements that break from the conventional image of great-looking, successful projects. That’s why they usually go viral through streamers, who eventually attract the mass audience watching their videos.
Lethal Company fits perfectly into this category, as it is all about fun core gameplay, not its low-poly graphics and bad animations. The game puts players in the role of corporate workers who should collect space scrap and reach the profit quota set by the company. The twist? The nights here can be really dangerous.
Zeekerss put a lot of effort into the core mechanics to make everything work like an entertaining co-op experience. As Carless pointed out, “I guess games are increasingly (in the non ‘massive F2P/AAA’ area) becoming a hobbyist/semi-pro industry with some serious upside.” And Steam remains the perfect home for these indie titles.
Lethal Company is currently in Early Access, with Zeekerss planning to focus on frequent content updates that will feature new creatures, items, and decorations. So it is interesting to see the state of the game a year from now
