"Thief with guns" FPS Gloomwood tops Steam after shifting launch plans to dodge Cyberpunk 2077 showcase
Gloomwood (opens in new tab) is the latest retro shooter from Dusk and Ultrakill publisher New Blood Interactive, and after the team moved its Early Access launch up a day hoping to get ahead of this week's Cyberpunk 2077 news, it's quickly become a top seller on Steam.
New Blood head Dave Oshry discussed the decision to advance Gloomwood's launch in a recent Twitter (opens in new tab) thread. The short version, as Oshry explains, is that after seeing CD Projekt Red's announcement, the team at New Blood wanted to avoid overlap with Tuesday's Cyberpunk 2077 showcase and the potential updates and/or sales it could bring, as a big turnout for Cyberpunk would make it much harder to fight for rank on Steam.
"If you drop DLC on Tuesday and put the game on sale, we're fucked, there goes our number one," Oshry says of the Cyberpunk showcase. After speaking to some folks at CD Projekt Red about the studio's Tuesday plans, and obviously confirming the state of Gloomwood, New Blood floated the idea of launching the game a day early on September 5. The benefit of hitting the quiet period of US Labor Day helped push the decision through.
"The top 10 of Steam is dead; if we release today, we're going number one," Oshry says. "And we did! It turned out to be a really good decision. We got to launch the game a day early, which made everybody happy. And it turned out Cyberpunk didn't go on sale, so we stayed at number one for 24 hours."
"That's the benefit of being an indie game," Oshry adds. "We saw something that we needed to get out of the way and we pivoted. We thought, being on September 6, we were already good, but you never know, AAA could fly in and fuck your shit up at any time."
Rather than stepping on Gloomwood's toes,
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