It's a fond hope, a fool's hope, but perhaps 2024 will be remembered not as the year of Yet More Layoffs, but the year of Unexpected Hits. Surprise record-setters like Palworld, which I don't especially like, Helldivers 2, which I rather enjoy, and now Content Warning, which I'm still figuring out. If you missed it, the co-op horror game released on Monday with a temporary free promotion, and racked up a 200,000-player Steam concurrency last night. Published by Totally Accurate Battle Simulator outfit Landfall, it's sort of like Lethal Company in being about venturing into horrible places as a wibbly-wobbly defenceless explorer, but rather than gathering scrap for resale, you're filming yourself and the monsters in a bid to publish a viral "SpookTube" video, with tuber celebrity translating into cash for new equipment.
Each video is edited together automatically from your footage and accompanying voicechat, once you return from each trip to the Old World, and you can watch it all on an in-game monitor with a mocked-up chat feed and viewcount. It's a pungent, potted commentary on the machinations of Youtube celebrity, with heady notes of "cautionary tale about algorithmic content generation" and "cautionary tale about people endangering or hurting themselves being a dependable source of views". Urgh, I can feel an op-ed coming on. In the meantime, here's how the developers - a team of only five - are updating Content Warning following its launch success.