Geneshift – Nik Nak Studios’ Miracle

This is a guest post from Contributor Mitch Ford

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Indie game Geneshift, by Nik Nak Studios, becomes the 10th most played game on Steam, ever.

It didn’t achieve this status because of any kind of superior design, experience, or underlying feature that Geneshift stands head and shoulders above the thousands of other indie games out there. Instead, Geneshift grew rapidly in player count due to a simple post on Reddit, which spurred a great number of Steam bots to flood into the GTA inspired Battle Royale game.

The developer explains the events that took place in a Reddit post which has amassed over 85,000 upvotes. In the post, they thanked the Reddit community for their support and explained the explosive rise in players.

“It turns out that there’s a glitch in Steam where people can use bots to farm for trading cards. Normally this isn’t a problem, but because the game was free at the time these bots could scale into the thousands and sell the cards for zero cost. Because of Reddit’s exposure, a bunch of bots noticed Geneshift and caused it to shoot up to over 213,000 concurrent players within a couple of hours! I estimate at least 99% of these “players” were bots.” – Nik Nak Studios.

So while the player count doesn’t reflect the actual player number of Geneshift, the exposure is very real. This exposure has been highly beneficial and led to a natural interest.

Modesty goes a long way, and in this case, it’s very fortunate the developer had stayed humble, as this has only contributed to more players getting their hands on Geneshift after reading the explanation and subsequent gratuitous post.

In this Grand Theft Auto inspired, top-down shooter, players pick each other off one by one. While running from an encroaching storm (seems to be the thing these days), players pick up loot and weapons. Vehicles can be used to mow down enemies, and each match only lasts for around 2 minutes.

The storyline isn’t anything to write your mother about. Instead, taking on frequently used elements without making any adaptions:

A nasty Corporation, Zombies, and well, that’s about it.

This just means there isn’t a load of extra information to cloud your enjoyment in the fast-paced battles and mayhem. But one might wonder how the storyline was left so thin after nearly 9 years in development.

Some features that I found interesting were the level editor which allows players to create their own environment to share with the community and a referral program that rewards players for inviting their friends to the server.

Geneshift is available in Early Access on Steam for $15, which includes current the Early Access version, plus the current DLC. At the moment, it’s only available on PC but the developer has indicated that this may change in the future which is understandable given the rise in popularity.

It goes to show that a great concept, simple execution, and a little luck, can go a long way.