On February 23, Sons of the Forest was released, a horror survival game by Endnight Games. The game debuts at number 1 on the top sellers on Steam, even though many fans were unable to purchase it directly at release – the servers could not handle it.
What kind of game is this?
- Sons of the Forest is the sequel to The Forest, one of the best survival games for PC and PlayStation.
- You crash in search of a missing billionaire on an island and now try to survive there. Mutants, cannibals, hunger, and weather make life difficult for you.
- Sons of the Forest features a building and crafting system, co-op for up to 8 players, and crazy enemies that you can fight with 24 different weapons. More about the game can be found in the info hub:
This is how Sons of the Forest starts: On February 23 at 7:00 PM, Sons of the Forest was released. It was originally planned to fully launch the game, but developer Endnight Games decided to release the game only as Early Access initially.
Nevertheless, Sons of the Forest launches as a huge success. Even before release, it was the most wished-for game on Steam. Now, after the first hours, the number of simultaneous players peaked at 269,563 (via Steam).
This means that Sons of the Forest has more peak players than Lost Ark and almost as many as Hogwarts Legacy. It has also surpassed Rust and is currently the largest survival game on Steam.
Furthermore, Sons of the Forest is immediately the best-selling game on Steam, even though many could not purchase it at the start. Just in time for the release, the Steam servers had problems, store pages could not be accessed, and games could not be purchased afterwards.
You can read in detail how the release went in our live ticker, which we used to accompany Sons of the Forest. In the video, you can find out everything you need to know about the game in 2 minutes:
Sons of the Forest: A huge success on Steam and Twitch
The new survival game has not only been well received by players but also by viewers. During the server problems, the game had over 720,000 viewers on Twitch and was, at least briefly, the largest game on the streaming platform.
What’s interesting is that Sons of the Forest is actually an absolute indie game. It has been released solely for PC, and fans are only hoping for possible versions for PlayStation and Xbox.
The majority of the specialized press could not play beforehand, accordingly there are virtually no tests. Even streamers and other influencers did not receive keys in advance. The developers themselves are almost completely silent on social media and only post very sparsely news about the game.
Nevertheless, the hype around Sons of the Forest was apparently big enough to catapult it to several top spots. This is partly thanks to the immense success of its predecessor. You can find a more detailed assessment of the game here:
Survival MMOs lack what WoW is for MMORPGs – Will Sons of the Forest be “the big thing”?
