Liar's Bar peaks at over 100k CCU on Steam, marking another indie success for Turkish devs this year
It’s fascinating to see Turkish studios finding success on Steam this year. The latest example is Liar’s Bar, a co-op twist on the card game cheat with a grim version of Zootopia-like characters and deadly rules.
Launched in Early Access on October 2, Liar’s Bar is a first-person multiplayer game that puts four players around a table in a dimly lit bar. They engage in one of the two game modes — Liar’s Dice and Liar’s Deck — with the goal of bluffing and challenging the liar (the unsuccessful challenge results in drinking poison or undergoing a Russian Roulette trial).
Liar’s Bar initially peaked at a relatively decent 2,000 concurrent users at launch (via SteamDB), but its player count has steadily grown organically since then. On October 21, the game reached 113,798 CCU, and the numbers will likely increase in the future.
This already places it in the top 20 biggest Steam releases of 2024 by peak CCU, right between Granblue: Fantasy Relink (114k CCU) and Hades II (103.5k CCU).
Liar’s Bar owes its virality not only to its concept, but also to the growing attention of streamers across the world. If you type “Liar’s Bar” on YouTube, you’ll find hundreds of videos ranging from tens of thousands to even millions of views. And interest has increased significantly over the past two weeks.
For the week of October 8-15, Liar’s Bar ranked as the 12th highest-grossing product on Steam globally, climbing 41 positions. With its CCU count still going up, it has every chance of landing in the top 10 on the charts this week.
Who is Curve Animation, the developer of Liar's Bar?
- Curve Animation is an Ankara-based media company co-founded in 2014 by artists Selçuk Yağcı and Ece Bilgehan, with the support of Turkey’s Ministry of Science, Industry and Technology.
- The team initially focused on creating animation films, planning to expand into other mediums in the future.
- Last year, it released its successful animated TV series “İki Balkon” (The Balcony Duo), also raising over ₺12 million (around $419k at the exchange rate at the time) from crowdfunding investors.
- The studio’s portfolio includes mobile title Chicken Away, but Liar’s Bar has become its full-fledged video game debut and put the team on the map.
The game currently has a “Very Positive” rating on Steam, with 87% of the 6,700 reviews being positive. According to Steam Scout, nearly 80% are written in English and Chinese, with almost equal shares, followed by Russian (8.9%), Portuguese – Brazil (3.39%), Turkish (3.28%), and German (1.54%).
Liar’s Bar is another success story from Turkish developers this year, following the likes of Kebab Chefs! and Supermarket Simulator. What they all have in common is that the studios came from different business areas, mostly mobile game development, to conquer the global Steam market.
Curve Animation plans to support Liar’s Bar with fixes and content updates. Version 1.0 is expected to have two additional game modes, as well as new characters and in-game monetization. So it will be interesting to see whether the project succeeds in the long term.
