When did Lethal Company come out, and how did it get so popular?

Over the last few weeks, Lethal Company has taken the Steam charts by storm. The game has come seemingly out of nowhere to be consistently ranked as one of the most played games on the PC platform. But how did this come about?

When was Lethal Company released?

Let’s start at the beginning. Lethal Company was released into Steam Early Access on October 23, 2023. That means the game isn’t technically out yet. Early Access is for games in the pre-1.0 stage. The quality varies, but good Early Access titles typically have enough to play right now while the developer continues to work on the game.

That means you can buy Lethal Company while it’s in Early Access and play it right now, but the game may look very different in a few months.

The gameplay in Lethal Company revolves around scavenging scrap on abandoned moons with up to four friends. It’s a horror game, so you’re not in for a relaxing ride, and one of the best parts of playing in co-op is when your friends are in trouble, and you’re powerless to help them. It has that Left 4 Dead team camaraderie and unpredictability that keeps people playing that series over a decade later.

In the Early Access notes for the game, the developer Zeekerss, says they plan to have the game finished within six months after launch, which would be around April or May 2024. In that time, expect to see more creatures and items added to the game, along with other improvements.

Why is Lethal Company so popular?

Like many Early Access games that make it big on Steam, Lethal Company appears to have generated massive hype through word of mouth. The game already has over 130,000 reviews at the time of writing and holds an “Overwhelmingly Positive” rating on Steam.

To give some perspective as to just how astounding that is, Starfield, one of the biggest AAA games of the year, was released over a month before Lethal Company and has just over 83,000 reviews at the time of writing with a “Mixed” rating. That’s with Starfield having a higher all-time peak on Steam than Lethal Company, too.

Furthermore, as a co-op game, Lethal Company lends itself well to word of mouth success. If you find a game you love and it’s better with friends, why wouldn’t you recommend it to your gaming group?

That word of mouth also extends to streaming. Lethal Company has been one of the most watched games on Twitch, regularly beating out recent releases like Modern Warfare 3 and Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora. At the time of writing, the Lethal Company category has over five times the number of followers as Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora.

Streaming viewers can be used as a way to get a rough understanding of how a game is doing. However, a lot of viewers doesn’t necessarily mean the reaction is positive. At the time of writing, The Day Before has 27k viewers to Lethal Company’s 37k, but given the overwhelmingly negative reaction to the game, that could be people watching it to see how bad it is. Of course, Lethal Company doesn’t have that problem.

A couple more reasons could indicate why Lethal Company has spread like wildfire. The first is that the game is only $9.99. That’s not a lot when we’re frequently seeing big releases from major publishers cost $70 or more, and for a game with such great reviews, it becomes an easy sell at that price.

The final potential reason is the game’s system requirements. Lethal Company requires an Intel i5-7400 CPU and a Nvidia GTX 1050 or equivalent. Oh, and a minuscule 1GB of space. It’s easy to forget when a lot of focus is on whatever the latest and greatest Nvidia GPU is, but most Steam users don’t have that kind of hardware.

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 20 series was released in 2018, but as of November 2023, four of the top ten most popular GPUs on Steam are older than that. All but one of the top ten most popular cards are currently 50 or 60 series models. Those are traditionally the more budget friendly options.

When you get a game that combines excellent word of mouth, a reasonable price, and a low barrier of entry for hardware, you get something like Lethal Company, which far exceeds expectations.