This Game About Murdering Furries Is Suspiciously Blowing up on Steam. Why?

Have you ever wanted to kill furries? No, probably not. I mean, if you snapped a finger and disappeared every furry in the world, our entire technological infrastructure would likely fall apart (as the meme goes). But for some reason, developer Sujikon created a game about killing furries. The game has been out for three years, with no update since January. And now, overnight, the game is a Steam sensation. It’s even more popular than inZOI.

No, seriously. inZOI. Look for yourself.

Uh. What? Why?! What’s going on?

Kill Furries For HOW MUCH?!

For the past year, Furry Killer has struggled to hit double digits on Steam per day. In the past three months alone, the game has generally hovered around one to three players. That’s somewhat unsurprising, given the game looks rudimentary in nature. Designed as a top-down shooter in GameMaker, Furry Killer throws players into a forest and lets them gib furries into a vicious red mess. It looks like the kind of game you’d find on Newgrounds back in the 2000s, a silly Flash game meant to kill time after finishing your Photoshop assignment in your high school Computer Lab class. Instead, Sujikon sells the game for $30.

That’s right. This, for THIRTY DOLLARS.

It’s dropped to 49 cents a dozen times, according to SteamDB, along with various other price fluctuations. But, Sujikon has kept the game at $29.99 since March 26.

Is the game worth buying at two cents? Apparently not. One Steam user warned, “The enemies are all the exact same and all pathetically easy to dodge.” Yet, Furry Killer is plagued by technical issues that cause it to perform poorly on players’ systems.

“If you dare playing for an extended period of time it will also lag,” that user wrote, “because the gore is never removed and I’m pretty sure getting to wave 999 without cheating is physically impossible because of that.”

To be clear, SteamDB isn’t glitching out. Steam itself lists Furry Killer as the 45th most played game on the platform as of this article’s writing, with 30,437 players at 1:00pm EST. The game’s 24-hour peak was 31,000 as well.

PC gamers seemingly aren’t dropping $30 for the simplistic and crude GameMaker game, however. Steam’s global Top Sellers chart doesn’t list the game at all, even though inZOI is the ninth most popular game globally on the Steam Top Sellers leaderboard. Additionally, Furry Killer doesn’t appear in any of the Top Sellers region charts across Steam. From Australia to Japan, China to Russia, South Korea to North America, Furry Killer is just popping off on Steam without reporting any major sale numbers.

This led one Steam user to argue Sujikon “may be artificially inflating its player count using bots to climb the Steam charts,” encouraging others to report the game. Why? Furry Killer just dropped Steam Trading Cards.

The curious case of the Steam trading cards

Early this morning, Furry Killer added a series of Steam Trading Cards to the game, along with emoticons, profile backgrounds, and badges. The trading cards feature various guns, but their art style clashes significantly with the game’s pixel aesthetic. Additionally, one card shows a pistol that seemingly blends with its user’s skin. It’s possible that Sujikon used AI to churn out Furry Killer trading cards

According to a 2020 story for Game Developer, Steam Trading Cards sold on the Steam Marketplace offer a 10% cut to the developer and an 85% cut to the seller. Perhaps Sujikon, in an attempt to grab a return on the game due to general low sales, published Steam Trading Cards for its own game and then plans to resell them to various Steam users with a series of bots. Or maybe Sujikon is sending bots over to play the game in a desperate attempt to convince people to drop $30 on Furry Killer, then makes a return on cards.

It’s not really clear. All we have is the sheer coincidence of Furry Killer‘s high performance and the Furry Killer Steam Trading Card launch. Regardless, it seems like a matter of time until Steam responds in some shape or form. A low-quality game garnering tens of thousands of players is simply insanity. Waypoint reached out to Steam and Sujikon for comment.