Shotgun Farmers Launches As #1 Xbox Game Thanks To Unconventional Marketing

An unlikely indie first-person shooter named Shotgun Farmers has topped the Xbox sales charts for the past three days using little else but hard work and the raw marketing power of TikTok. First released on Steam in March of 2019 following several years in Early Access, Shotgun Farmers is a multiplayer shooter themed around life in the barnyard. Firearms are themed after plants and there’s no reloading, but shooting the ground can grow a new gun to use. The game supports ten players per match and features unlockable cosmetics, a zombie-infested horde mode, and support for AI bots for offline play.

Shotgun Farmers has consistently offered free updates for its players, even after releasing out of Early Access. The game is developed by Megastorm Games, and it’s only their second release to date. The first release was 2016’s Skyhook, a Smash Bros.-esque platform fighter where players swing around arenas with grappling hooks. While both games are rated positively by the Steam audience, Shotgun Farmers has clearly seen more activity (and, more importantly, sales), and that behavior seems to have stretched over to its Xbox debut.

ShotgunFarmers‘ launch on Xbox One was announced by creator and part-time TikTok personality QaziTV at the end of last week, and it’s grown massively in popularity in the days since. As marked by the official Shotgun Farmers Twitter, it’s held the top paid game spot on the Xbox Store since Sunday, besting perennial chart-topping blockbusters like Madden 21, NBA 2K21, and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. As one might expect from an unexpectedly huge launch, the servers for the game were up and down throughout this period, with the developers promising a patch ASAP for the ailing game. This is complicated further by the implementation of cross-play between the PC and Xbox One versions of the game.

One advantage Shotgun Farmers has over all the games it’s topping at the moment and many other popular AAA titles are cartoony visuals in the same style as recent indie hits Fall Guys and Among Us, but it has a secret weapon – TikTok. Since its early access days on Steam, Shotgun Farmers has enjoyed a well-managed social media presence thanks to developer QaziTV’s considerable following on the social media app. Updates about the game generate millions of views, and it’s those kinds of numbers and the word-of-mouth FOMO that can topple gaming juggernauts like Madden in 2020.

It’s always heartening to see a game from a small team like Shotgun Farmers achieve massive success out of nowhere. While this kind of situation does crop up in other mediums, games seem uniquely positioned to pit the most homegrown of products against the big boys in direct competition. Couch potatoes can’t channel flip from The Bachelor to a Running on Empty Food Review on the same service, but they can switch from Marvel’s Avengers to the more charming Untitled Goose Game on the same console with little effort. With Switch and PlayStation ports to come, here’s hoping that Shotgun Farmers and its novel shooting mechanics can continue to break indies further into the console mainstream.

Source: YouTube

Shotgun Farmers is available now for Xbox One and PC.

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