The Success Behind Lethal Company, a Horror Game of Horrific Hijinks
By Douglas Faulkner
Like other entertainment industries, the gaming industry can look intimidating to enter due to the recurrence of big-name properties getting content every year. For those new to the field, it can feel demotivating, but there is a benefit that the gaming industry has over its brothers in entertainment, and that would be the recency of its beginnings.
The first form of the video game industry started in 1970 with arcade machines, making the industry not even a century old and making it less understood by established publishers and more open to independent and new creators.
Minecraft is one of the most popular games of all time and was made by an independent game studio named Mojang before it was bought by Microsoft. Every year, there’s always at least one indie game that stands out and gets a ton of reception, and near the end of last year, that game was Lethal Company, so what made it succeed?
In Lethal Company, you must explore planets with randomly generated facilities, with your main goal being to find and sell enough scrap to meet the in-game three-day quota and to escape each planet before midnight. Successfully doing so will keep the game going, with more demanding quotas for each one met. However, with it being a horror game, there are a variety of creatures who will halt your progress, with most of them having the ability to kill you, putting your crew down a player for that day as well as limiting how much ground you can cover.
The gameplay loop is simple, and that's a part of that appeal. Simple games are easy to understand, and in combination with its low price tag, the game is intentionally making itself accessible to everyone.
Several games today are moving to a cost of $70 per player, an intimidating amount for a game a friend group isn't guaranteed to enjoy. In comparison, Lethal Company is priced at only $10, a price low enough that customers are less likely to feel buyer’s remorse even if they don’t end up enjoying the game.
These are some of the reasons that Lethal Company has been able to succeed, but I believe the game’s burst in popularity can be attributed to an online culture that has cemented itself in the gaming corners of the internet.
If you’ve been using the internet for a while, you’ll probably know about the YouTuber PewDiePie, an independent creator who sits in the top 10 most subscribed YouTubers of all time and is the first person to have reached 50 million subscribers. PewDiePie started his channel playing a variety of games, but what his younger self and some other gaming YouTubers today would become known for would be their horror game playthroughs.
However, this is still quite an enigma, as historically, there have been few instances of horror games reaching market-defining levels of success. So how did one of the biggest entertainers on the internet make himself known by playing such games?
Well, that’s because watching someone play a horror game is very different from playing one. Playing a horror game is like learning to drive a car for the first time. You may know what to do, but you're still afraid to mess up because of the potential consequences.
When watching someone play a horror game though, it instead becomes about how they handle and react to the scares, and this is why playing horror games became so big on YouTube, as it gave creators the opportunity for their personality to shine under the unique conditions that horror games place them under.
Lethal Company uses an in-game microphone, filtered to mimic communication through a helmet and only audible to other players who are in proximity or dead and spectating you. It adds a lot to the experience and gets people to become immersed in the game, but most importantly, it also lets you experience the reactions of others getting scared, fulfilling a similar satisfaction to that of watching someone else play a horror game.
You’ll run into all sorts of situations that can be both hilarious and terrifying, and since each planet’s facilities are random, there’s only so much you and your crew can prepare yourself for, making every round a different experience. So, if you're looking to play something with your friends that’s accessible, cheap and horrifically funny then you check out Lethal Company.