A Game About Walking With Your Friends Is Beating AAA Games on Steam. What Is Going On?

Big Walk sold one million copies in six days and is still sitting near the top of Steam. No guns, no battle pass, no monsters. Just friends, puzzles, terrible communication and a very big walk.

Right now, one of the highest-grossing games on Steam is not a new Call of Duty, an enormous RPG or a free-to-play game designed to keep you logging in every day. It is a $20 indie game where you go for a walk with your friends.

Big Walk is currently #5 on Steam's global top-sellers chart by revenue, sitting alongside Counter-Strike 2, Apex Legends, Dota 2 and other games with marketing budgets probably larger than House House itself. SteamDB also shows a peak of 46,409 simultaneous Steam players, while the game remains comfortably inside the platform's most-played new releases more than two weeks after launch.

The really ridiculous number came six days after release. Publisher Panic announced that more than one million people had already bought Big Walk. For comparison, House House's previous cultural phenomenon, Untitled Goose Game, took about three months to reach the same milestone.

And Big Walk did this while the PS5 version was simultaneously included as an August PlayStation Plus Monthly Game, meaning plenty of PlayStation players did not even need to buy it individually. Sony currently lists it as included with PS Plus until September 1.

So why is everybody suddenly paying money to walk around the Australian bush with their friends?

Big Walk barely explains itself, and that is kind of the point

Big Walk comes from House House, the tiny Melbourne studio responsible for Untitled Goose Game. It supports anywhere from 2 to 12 players, with full crossplay between PC, Mac, PS5 and Nintendo Switch 2. There is an actual handcrafted campaign and an ending, but the developers almost aggressively refuse to tell you exactly what you are supposed to do.

You arrive on a huge island. You walk around. You discover strange machines and structures. You find puzzles. Sometimes you solve them. Sometimes somebody steals your binoculars and kicks them into the ocean.

That last example is literally how House House describes the game.

Big Walk's official press kit includes plenty of the chaos that happens when several people try to cooperate. GIF: House House / Panic.

There is no combat. PC Gamer's review points out that there are no monsters, no death, no jumpscares and effectively no traditional fail state. If you fall off something, you get briefly stunned and continue walking. The pressure comes almost entirely from trying to communicate with other human beings, which, as anyone who has ever been in a group project knows, is more than enough difficulty already.

The voice chat might be the smartest thing in the whole game

Big Walk really does not want you sitting in Discord while playing.

Its proximity voice system makes your friends' voices fade as they move away from you. Voices echo through corridors, become muffled through walls and crackle when transmitted through walkie-talkies. If somebody wanders too far away, they can basically disappear from the conversation.

And puzzles deliberately mess with communication. Sometimes one person can see information that another cannot. Sometimes a wall prevents you from hearing each other. Sometimes someone has to relay information between two separated players. Eventually people start waving, pointing, jumping, flashing lights and inventing their own bizarre sign language.

PC Gamer's Christopher Livingston described how his group gradually developed gestures that could mean different things depending on the situation. What started as frantic arm waving eventually became a language the group understood almost instinctively. His overall verdict was that the game turns communication itself into the puzzle.

House House even patched the voice chat after players complained that some microphones were too quiet, but deliberately refused to increase how far voices travel. The studio said the limited range is an important part of the game's design.

See how it actually works

Official gameplay overview:

MoistCr1TiKaL playing Big Walk:

xQc playing Big Walk:

The streamer reaction is part of why the game has travelled so quickly. xQc called Big Walk a “breath of fresh air for the gaming industry” after playing it, while MoistCr1TiKaL devoted multiple streams and videos to it.

One million sales was not just launch-day hype

This is the part that really caught my attention. Big Walk did not hit a million sales and immediately disappear.

When I checked SteamDB on August 18, two weeks after release, Big Walk was still #5 globally by Steam revenue. Its Steam peak sits at 46,409 concurrent players.

Steam itself currently shows 17,489 reviews from verified Steam purchasers, while 94% of its 13,267 English-language reviews are positive. Including reviews from other key sources, nearly 20,000 reviews have been submitted. Steam also displays a 91 Metacritic score.

On PlayStation, the response is similarly strong. Sony's store currently shows a 4.54/5 player rating from more than 14,000 ratings.

Those are not tiny launch-day samples anymore. A lot of people have played this thing.

No XP bars required. GIF: House House / Panic.

And now everyone is arguing about “friendslop”

Yes, unfortunately, that is the name.

Friendslop has become gaming slang for inexpensive multiplayer games where the best part is not necessarily mastering complex mechanics but creating stupid situations with your friends.

Think Content Warning. R.E.P.O.. PEAK. Lethal Company. Games that become considerably funnier because Dave has fallen off something while screaming into proximity chat.

The Financial Times recently devoted an entire piece to the trend, using Big Walk as one of its central examples. The idea is that these games are designed around the social experience itself: the people playing with you are effectively part of the content.

Big Walk fits the trend almost perfectly, but House House is not especially enthusiastic about the name.

During a Reddit AMA, developer Nico Disseldorp said he liked having a term for games where friends are the important part, but added that he would prefer if the second word were not “slop,” particularly because it now carries associations with things such as AI-generated slop.

Fair enough.

Spending years carefully building a game only for the internet to invent a genre whose name basically means “garbage with friends” has to hurt a little.

Reddit's reaction explains the appeal better than most reviews

The r/Games review thread is full of players initially assuming Big Walk was just another chaotic multiplayer sandbox and then discovering something much more structured underneath.

Several people compare it less to games like R.E.P.O. and more to The Witness, because the island teaches you how its puzzles work without constantly throwing tutorials and objective markers onto the screen. Players gradually learn the rules by exploring and experimenting.

The campaign generally takes groups somewhere around a dozen hours depending on how distracted they become, although technically nothing stops you from spending half of that time playing hide-and-seek, painting each other or throwing important objects into the sea.

One of the most common questions on Reddit has simply been whether it works with only two people. Players say yes, although groups around three to five are frequently described as the sweet spot between actual cooperation and complete disaster. The game itself officially supports every group size from 2 through 12.

Another interesting reaction came from Australian players. Big Walk's landscape feels unusually specific because it basically is. House House revealed that its world is directly inspired by Wilsons Promontory National Park in Victoria. The team started with a LIDAR heightmap of the real landscape, used plants native to the region, photographed local textures and recorded environmental sounds there.

That detail somehow makes walking around doing absolutely nothing feel more intentional.

The island is based heavily on the real landscape of Wilsons Promontory in Victoria, Australia. GIF: House House / Panic.

The most interesting thing about Big Walk might be what it refuses to do

There is no battle pass. No daily login streak. No endless gear grind. No competitive ranking system. House House is not currently promising years of seasonal content either.

When players asked what comes next during the Reddit AMA, the developers basically said: they need a rest.

There are currently no major content updates announced. The team designed Big Walk as something with a beginning and an ending rather than an eternal service game.

That sounds almost strange in 2026.

The gaming industry has spent years trying to answer the question: How do we keep players inside our game for as long as humanly possible?

Big Walk's answer appears to be: we don't.

Come in. Bring your friends. Get lost. Solve the puzzles. Have a laugh. Reach the end.

Then maybe play something else.

And people bought a million copies anyway.

This might be a bigger indie trend than Big Walk itself

Look at Steam's current charts and something interesting starts appearing. Big Walk is sitting at #5, while another cheap cooperative indie phenomenon, PEAK, remains at #19 with tens of thousands of players online months after release.

These games do something AAA multiplayer often struggles to reproduce: they give you enough structure to create stories without trying to manufacture every story for you.

The memorable moment is not usually the cutscene.

It is your friend getting lost because they ignored everyone.

It is somebody dropping the one object you needed.

It is four people screaming because nobody understands what the person on the other side of the wall is trying to communicate.

It is an inside joke that will make absolutely no sense to anyone who was not there.

Personally, I think that is why Big Walk is hitting so hard. There are technically much more impressive multiplayer games available right now, but Big Walk understands something extremely simple: sometimes you are not looking for a game to play with your friends.

You are looking for an excuse to spend three hours talking to them.

House House built that excuse, charged twenty bucks for it, and more than a million people said yes.

That might explain why a game whose main selling point is literally walking and talking is currently outselling most of Steam.

Maybe “friendslop” is not slop at all. Maybe people are just tired of games that forget the friends are supposed to be the fun part.