Can he do it again? The creator of Steam sensation Bongo Cat, Marcel Zurawka, is taking a new idle typing game to Gamescom as he searches for a publisher for it. He won’t tell me what it is yet when we talk on Discord, because he only has a small build to show publishers, he says, and is a month or two from revealing more. But if Zurawka can leverage even a fraction of Bongo Cat’s audience to play the new game, it could be huge.
If you don’t know, Bongo Cat has consistently been one of the most played Games on Steam since it launched earlier this year, regularly claiming as many as 150,000 concurrent players. I spoke to Zurakwa about Bongo Cat’s extraordinary story earlier this summer, and suggested then that astronomical though those numbers were, the game might not have had its biggest moment. A mysterious update was on the way that had the power to transform the game, I said, but I couldn’t tell you anything about it. Now I can. You can even play it for yourself, because Meowtiplayer, as it’s adorably called, arrived this week.
It’s simple but incredibly effective. Multiplayer allows you to add friends’ Bongo Cats to your screen and watch as they paw-bop to each keystroke or button press that your friends make. I tested it with Zurawka, and even with only one extra Bongo Cat on the screen, it was oddly hypnotic and spontaneously hilarious. But there’s scope to go much bigger. The game officially supports a massive 100 people Bongo Catting together (let’s make a verb out of it). Unofficially, Zurawka tells me, it can go as high as 250, which is, frankly, ludicrous. There’s not enough space on the screen.
It’s inspired, not only because adding more people adds more fun, especially at such an outrageous scale, but also because having other people naturally there reinforces a desire within us to show off. To show all of our cat skins and cat hats. To parade around as if wearing our hard-earned spoils in a massively multiplayer online world. And yes, some of these items can be bought, which has resulted in a spike in sales for Zurawka, but as I pointed out in my previous Bongo Cat piece, the game – for all its popularity – doesn’t actually make any money.
But back to the point: have the player numbers spiked to a record high, after the update, as I suggested they might? Well no. Or maybe yes. It’s hard to tell. And it’s hard to tell because when Bongo Cat was reaching 150,000 concurrent players a day, it was also plagued by bots. Roughly half of that figure was accounted for by them. But – and this is another notable recent update – they’ve now gone. “We finally got the bots,” Zurakwa excitedly told me on Discord this morning.
You can see the moment this happens if you look at the one-month view of Bongo Cat’s player-numbers on SteamDB. At the end of July, the number suddenly tumbles from around ~150,000 daily concurrents to ~80,000. But the numbers are picking up again. The release of Meowtiplayer update this week has boosted the numbers to nearly 100,000 concurrents, which if you factor in the old ‘half of the players were bots’ equation, suggests the game really is more popular than ever. Or perhaps that’s wishful maths on my part.
Coincidentally, the recent dip in numbers also puts Bongo Cat head-to-head in the Steam Most Played rankings with rival idle sensation Banana, which is such a strange sentence to write. But are those Banana figures accurate? Zurawka doubted it before, when we spoke, and I don’t see that anything has changed.
Regardless, Bongo Cat’s star beams as brightly as ever, and I can’t help but wonder what Zurawka has conjured up to follow it.
