Another BIG (s)HIT for Sony.
Do you remember Goodbye Volcano High? Of course not, I couldn’t blame you especially considering how the game was first announced during the PlayStation 5 reveal event Sony held on June 11, 2020 and then what followed was absolutely nothing.
Goodbye Volcano High is a woke LGBTQ+ visual novel, but not only that the entire focus of the visual novel is that of anthropomorphized animals or “furries” for a better term.
The initial reveal trailer, a visual novel being one of the many titles to showcase the alleged power of the then upcoming Sony PlayStation 5, was met with distain, another video game tarnished by woke identity politics and selfless political pandering.
The KO_OP team went radio silent since its initial announcement as development of the visual novel seemingly had hit snag after snag due to incompetence and or inexperience.
Years had gone by and absolutely nothing, no release in sight for the illusive visual novel, however individuals from 4chan decided to make their own rendition of Goodbye Volcano High, a coming of age centered story about high school and music, how hard could it be?
Quite easy in fact, the 4channers managed to make their own variation, dubbed “snoot game” which blatantly and hilariously stole the intellectual property of KO_OP with marginally altered character designs.
While Goodbye Volcano High had several years of development time at this point, a bunch of individuals from 4chan came together and made their own within a matter of months, which of course angered the developers who were stuck in developmental hell given how their woke abomination by the was actually years away from coming into fruition.
The developers of Goodbye Volcano High were so enraged regarding the release of Snoot Game that they started an actual outrage campaign and any sort of fanart produced of either Snoot Game or Goodbye Volcano High was miraculously combed through by indie studio KO_OP to make sure that the characters themselves were of their game and not the fan game which had actually released.
Finally, after three years since its initial announcement, Goodbye Volcano High has released on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 systems and PC because like all good Sony “exclusives”, they get a day one PC release as well.
Except for one problem, considering the backlash that KO_OP received during the reveal of its furry narrative-driven “adventure” visual novel, and the fact that a bunch of anonymous individuals came and stole your whole thunder with their game similar to yours which had released two years in advance, the release of Snoot Game should have been a wakeup call to KO_OP, majority of those who were interested in the game itself was laughing at the woke abomination that lay before them, so much so that they made their own goddamn game.
KO_OP had the chance to course correct from its political pandering, with Snoot Game preceding Goodbye Volcano High by two entire years you would imagine that they perhaps did a full rewrite but you’d be wrong, the game itself is forgettable to those who it was pandering to.
Goodbye Volcano High is going to be one of those games you’ll occasionally see in Steam’s discount bin at 80% off and yet nobody actually buys because who in their right mind would bother spending money on such a game, especially when Snoot Game isn’t an LGBT train wreck and is absolutely free.
And the fact that the game itself released around the same time as Armored Core VI and Bethesda’s Starfield, with Goodbye Volcano High seemingly coming out of nowhere releasing on August 29th with absolutely zero marketing.
Needless to say that its sales figures went about as well as you would expect.
With a peak player count on PC of ~290 players, it managed to hold its figure for all of about six hours before plummeting downwards and falling just short of 195 concurrent players the day after release.
Want to take a guess as to why the player count dropped so severely in such a short amount of time? The game itself can be completed in around 7 hours tops, three whole fucking years of development for like six hours of gameplay, marvelous, what a bargain.
The Japanese seemingly shit out visual novels on the daily and even then the most respectable visual novel developers don’t take nearly as much time as KO_OP did with Goodbye Volcano High and to top it all off, Japanese visual novels actually have branching character arcs that entice replayability, overall you’re more often than not able to get tens of hours out of a Japanese visual novel rather than 5-8 on this first party Snoot Game knockoff.
When looking at the graph for Twitch viewers, those figures didn’t take off until the second day of release apparently where Goodbye Volcano High apparently went from 600 views on Twitch to over 2,400 for all of three hours, how accurate SteamDB’s Twitch charts are though is questionable.
Live reaction to Goodbye Volcano High from one of Snoot Game’s developers.
However we can take away that the game already has fallen completely out of relevance mere days after release just like it had done a week following its initial announcement during one of Sony’s largest conference events.
However for reference sake, there is more people on a regular basis playing the adult RPG “Karryn’s Prison” on Steam directly, there are more people playing “MILFs of Sunville”, Deus Ex Mankind Divided a whole 7 years after it released and at any given time there are more people playing the 2001 cult classic GOTHIC than Goodbye Volcano high.
23 years and still going strong.
Considering how the game itself is basically a visual novel which had an undisclosed amount of development time allocated towards it, at least three years at a minimum, I’d be hard-pressed to imagine that its long and strenuous development would have been cheap, and I genuinely doubt that selling a few thousand copies at most across all platforms is going to recoup the costs of 36 months plus.
Three years of development (that we know of) and the Sony exclusive died in just three days following its release, how quaint.
So what we’re looking at here is another future bankruptcy probably, I highly doubt that a swarm of at least fifty thousand soylent Sony patrons are going to go out of their way in ensuring that Goodbye Volcano High is a financial success (or at least break even) by buying the game so look forward to studio KO_OP disbanding sometime in the near future after their woke visual novel doesn’t pan out for “they/them”selves.
