author: Mathias Zulpo
Survival game SCUM launches in Early Access, becomes Steam bestseller right away
SCUM – an MMO survival game developed by Serious Sam creators – launched in Steam Early Access and, a few hours later, almost became one of the platform's TOP 10 most popular games. See how that happened.
SCUM is not perfect, but it doesn’t care. Published by Devolver Digital – famous for the Hotline Miami series, among others – and developed by Croteam (Serious Sam, The Talos Principle), it just launched in Steam Early Access. SCUM is an MMO survival similar to DayZ – you run around the SCUM Island, dealing with zombies and other players, trying not to die. It received a lukewarm response from the Steam community.
And then it caught everybody off-guard, becoming Devlover’s fastest selling game of all time. Peaking at 50 thousand concurrent players a few hours after release, it nearly entered the TOP 10 of most popular games on Steam. The spike came and went, but before that, thousands players more had already bought the game. Nothing scared them off – not even the build number – the intimidating 0.1.16.8263.
Saying now that SCUM has a bright future ahead seems like an understatement. But everything that could go wrong – already went wrong.
Now it just needs more polishing
SCUM has enormous potential, but it will go nowhere without proper maintenance. Devs promise to take care of these issues asap:
- Poor optimization. It just sucks no matter the rig, with some saying that even RTX 2080 Ti wouldn’t be able to handle the game properly (i.e. at 60FPS in 1080p).
- Not too much content to play with. But some say it’s enough for now, and others believe they’ll see more soon.
There’s also lots of praise surrounding some of its mechanics. Fluid and responsive animation system is one of them (for instance, you move slower and get tired faster if you’re fat or wearing a heavy armor set, just like in real life). Another one is the crafting system – you can really play with your inventory. All the mechanics will also be tweaked in the future.
What’s so special about this particular island? Well, it’s best you figure it out yourself. Head over to SCUM’s Steam page and give it a shot.
