Steam Gains New Most Wishlisted Game After Controversy
Steam's list of the most wishlisted games in development has a new champion sitting atop the Steam charts, and that game is Stray. The game where you play as a cat and roam about a city while defending yourself against threats and exploring has dethroned The Day Before, a game which previously held the No. 1 spot for quite a while. This upset in the rankings comes just after The Day Before was the subject of some still ongoing controversy regarding innerworkings in the developer, Fntastic.
SteamDB keeps track of which games people are most looking forward to through the most wishlisted chart, and that chart currently has Stray sitting on top. It's true that it does trail The Day Before in followers, but Stray is still above it in terms of how many people have put it on their wishlists.
A couple of factors likely contributed to Stray ranking so high on this list. It's a game where you play as a cat that wears a backpack of sorts, so it's already got that going for it. Gameplay shown off so far has been promising, and at $29.99, it looks like a decent deal. It also helps that it's coming out in July which would naturally mean more people would start to wishlist it now as a reminder for later this month.
"See the world through the eyes of a cat and interact with the environment in playful ways," a preview of the Stray game said. "Be stealthy, nimble, silly, and sometimes as annoying as possible with the strange inhabitants of this mysterious world."
At the same time, The Day Before has some things going against it. Fntastic recently described its employees as volunteers separated into two categories: Full-time and part-time. Full-time volunteers are few and salaried while the part-timers "get cool rewards, participation certificates, and free codes." Considering how highly anticipated this game was, the revelation that not all of its employees were paid and that the developer was accepting volunteer work to get the game done did not go over exceptionally well with many. It doesn't help either that the game was recently delayed by nearly a full year which has the total opposite effect of Stray's nearness.
Stray will be out on July 19th, so look for the game to launch then to see if it lives up to the wishlist hype.