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4 weeks ago
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The latest surprise Steam hit is Content Warning, a Lethal Company-style game that’s enjoying enormous success on Valve’s platform off the back of a ‘free to keep’ promotion that ends soon.
Content Warning launched April 1 with 100% off for the first 24 hours, after which the game will cost $7.99. This promotion, plus the fact the game looks like a hoot, saw a concurrent players peak of 90,000 and rising.
“Every year for April 1st aka Landfall Day we do something special,” said publisher Landfall Publishing. “This year we’re releasing Content Warning for free for anyone who downloads it between now 9am PT and 9am PT tomorrow April 2nd.
“We do this as a special treat to our community so that as many people as possible will have the chance to play the game.”
The promo clearly worked, with Content Warning in the top 10 most-played games on Steam, over 7,500 reviews already, and an ‘overwhelmingly positive’ user review rating. In a tweet, Landfall said Content Warning had over 100,000 active players and over 4.5 million owners — all within 24 hours of coming out.
But what is Content Warning? The co-op horror indie game tasks you with filming your friends doing scary things to become “SpookTube famous!”, according to the official blurb. It works similarly to Lethal Company, which was a surprise hit on Steam when it launched last year — and is still going strong. You team up with friends to visit a scary world, get spooky footage, and (hopefully) make it back alive. Assume you do so, you upload your footage to SpookTube then watch the money roll in. If only it were that simple in real life!
Like Lethal Company, Content Warning is tailor made for streaming, so it's no surprise to see it doing decently on Twitch. The question of course is how will the game fare when it costs money to buy? Until then, you’ve got four hours to grab it for free.
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].
