by Valve’s own beloved sci-fi puzzle comedy Portal 2 has a 98% positive user rating on Steam (opens in a new tab). A handful of indie hits like A Short Hike, The Case of the Golden Idol, TOEM and Frog Detective 3 go as high as 99% positive. Placid Plastic Duck Simulator is about to join their ranks, with a rating of 98% positive trending up to 99% in the last 30 days (opens in a new tab).
If you haven’t heard of Placid Plastic Duck Simulator, you’re not alone. Despite accumulating over 3500 glowing recipes (opens in a new tab) on Steam, this game about watching ducks float hasn’t exactly made waves. (I’m sorry.) That said, over 1,000 people follow it on Twitch (opens in a new tab)and a video by Irish streamer RTGame (opens in a new tab) where he spends 15 minutes watching it while saying things like “Fantastic gameplay” has over 764,000 views
It’s really just a game of spotting ducks. The only controls are camera controls, and clicking on the toy ends simply makes them croak. At first, a single yellow duck floats in a lovingly rendered swimming pool by itself, but as the “duck meter” fills, more birds drop from the sky. The ducks come in different colors and patterns, some striped, some checked, one in full clown makeup. A couple of them have propellers, one on the hat, which it uses to fly around. Still, all you the player can do is watch as the sun sets and the ducks float.
In the months since its release, Placid Plastic Duck Simulator has sold over 70,000 copies, as developers Turbolento Games revealed to GameDiscoverCo (opens in a new tab) newsletter. Turbolento also developed a survival game called Starsand, a desert world survival game that Chris tested last year, under the name Tunnel Vision Studio. As the designers told GameDiscoverCo, Placid Plastic Duck Simulator was created as part of an internal game jam two and a half years into Starsand’s development. They threw it on Steam with “zero marketing”, and were happy to see “at least two major Japanese Twitter sites” post about it on release day. It took off in Asia first, and has now spread westwards.
Turbolento put its success down to the fact that “Players tell their own stories” as the ducks bubble about, especially while streaming. It’s also a cheap game, one you can pick up on a whim, although there’s more going on than the price tag might suggest. As the developers put it, “people drop $2 into a game that’s supposed to be a joke, only to find that there are 47 different hand-painted ducks to collect, several weird interactions, environmental events, a UFO, achievements, secrets , and a soundtrack to groove to. They’re happy and leave a positive review to share that joy with more people.”
Although on a much smaller scale, it reminds me of the way Coffee Stain Studios took a game jam prototype made as a joke after finishing the tower defense shooter Sanctum 2, released it and made a blockbuster out of Goat Simulator . Turbolento intends to continue supporting Placid Plastic Duck Simulator, with an expansion called Quacking the Ice (opens in a new tab) which adds a winter location and “increased cooldown” this month, and plans to add multiplayer support sometime around March of next year.
