How An Indie Aussie Game ‘Cult Of The Lamb’ Went Viral
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to form your own cult? Well, you can make all of your cult dreams come true thanks to a wildly successful new game created by indie studio Massive Monster based in Melbourne.
Cult Of The Lamb joins the slowly but surely growing list of hit Aussie indie games making moves overseas like Untitled Goose Game and Hollow Knight. Picture Animal Crossing, where you usually explore your peaceful island and build homes for your villagers. But now imagine an evil cult version, where you can deck out your home base with shrines to indoctrinate your followers and crops to feed them.
“The game kind of started out with basically just three people. So it’s kind of cool that you’re having these like tiny teams, they’re kind of like breaking out and selling more than like some of these triple A games,” creative director Julian Wilton told Junkee.
“Like we were kind of beating Spider Man for a little bit. I mean probably like an hour or something, but that’s just been really cool.”
A million copies of the game were sold globally in the first week. It climbed its way up global sales charts as soon as it was released, peaking at number three and currently sitting at number five of Steam’s weekly global top sellers chart.
There’s a few reasons why the studio thinks the game has gotten so popular….
Are Twitch Streamers The Influencers Of Gaming?
“One of the big things we hit well was kind of doing this Twitch integration,” said Wilton.
Twitch is a live-streaming platform where streamers — people who stream what they’re playing on Twitch — can draw massive audiences and therefore influence the popularity of games. The Cult Of The Lamb developers decided to give streamers early access to the game to stream to their communities. They also had specific Twitch integrations that allowed viewers to interact with the actual gameplay.
“They’re able to kind of play around with this Twitch integration we made, which kind of did a bunch of things… the chat [could] make characters in the game so they could kind of be part of it.
A lot of streamers kind of jumped on that and then would be talking about it and then other streamers would find out about it because they were talking about it.”
What Inspired The Game AKA Why Is There So Much Poop?
As for the overall cult theme, the studio had always planned to explore something a little bit dark, but not completely evil.
Wilton explained, “We knew we wanted to go a bit darker with this one. So I was exploring a lot of like Occult and Wicca kind of themes and doing these rituals and sacrifices and stuff. Cult leader was kind of perfect. You can be mean if you want to or you can be nice to them.”
Memes about the game, though, tend to point out one particularly entertaining part: the poop.
“I think I’m the one actually that’s probably responsible for it coming around. We kind of needed some more resources and loops in the game. Tamagotchi is a classic example. It is a bit gross, but it’s intuitive as well.”