5 Year Old Game Gets Sudden Player Count Spike

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Best Plumber, an obscure video game on Steam that was released in 2019, is experiencing a drastic increase in player count numbers for unknown reasons. Some gamers, however, have their suspicions over this bizarre player count spike, and they've come up with their own explanations as to why this is occurring with this particular Steam game.

While not incredibly common, sudden increases in player count numbers for older single-player games on Steam aren't all that unheard of. Sometimes, interest in older titles is revitalized thanks to them being played by popular Twitch streamers and YouTubers. In other cases, games with successful movie and TV show adaptations may bring in large amounts of new and returning gamers who want to spend more time in the worlds of the franchises they love. Cyberpunk 2077's sudden player count increase after the release of the Edgerunners update is a perfect example of this, for instance. The thing with these types of games that experience revivals, though, is that they're often well-known to begin with. That doesn't apply to this latest Steam title, however, which makes its major player count increase all the more strange.

As spotted by Reddit user teethcase in a post they made on the r/Steam subreddit, a random indie game by the name of Best Plumber had over 5,000 concurrent players on May 10, 2024. This is in spite of the fact that the title was released back in October 2019 and only has 56 user reviews on Steam at the time of writing. As for the game itself, which was made by a developer named Hograung Studio, it's a fairly standard pipe-connecting puzzler, similar to the puzzle games found on mobile phones. On top of that, it's one that apparently contains only an hour or so of content, according to some of the Steam reviews.

Given that there doesn't seem to be anything out of the ordinary with Best Plumber, this brings into question why this unassuming indie game began climbing up the ranks in player count numbers in the first place. While there aren't any definitive answers out there yet, a couple of the commenters responding to teethcase's Reddit post have some ideas. Reddit user earlgreybunnies, for instance, suggested that "maybe a streamer played" Best Plumber. Fellow Reddit user 131sean131 corroborated this by claiming that they recalled "a guy playing" this game in a short of some sort. Josesito8, on the other hand, made the suggestion that someone might be using bot accounts in the game to get more trading cards on Steam. They also proposed the idea that Best Plumber is likely being "used as a placeholder for cracked/pirated copies of games," though they didn't have any concrete evidence to back up that claim.

Either way, though, given how unnatural the player count statistics are for this game, it is possible that bots of some kind could be messing around with Best Plumber's rankings on the SteamDB charts. Why exactly anyone would target a puzzle game on Steam that's garnered little attention like this one, however, is anybody's guess. Nonetheless, strange occurrences like these are certainly interesting talking points for Steam players.