The video game industry is extremely competitive, especially in the fall. Major new video game releases come out every week, ranging from blockbuster titles to indie darlings. However, one new indie game has seemingly come out of nowhere to become the Xbox One's best-selling digital game, currently out-selling games like Madden NFL 21, NBA 2K21, and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. And that game is a quirky new FPS called Shotgun Farmers.
Shotgun Farmers has been available through Steam Early Access for some time now, but it just recently made its console debut on Xbox One. It's a classic-style arena shooter with versus multiplayer and a Horde mode. What helps Shotgun Farmers stand apart from the multitude of other FPS games is its unique concept; the game has cartoony visuals and all the weapons are based on vegetables, like the Sniperagus and the Carrocket. Taking the concept a step further, missed bullets can actually land on the ground and grow into ammo plants that players can harvest later.
Similarly to many other games that experience unexpected success, Shotgun Farmers had some server issues at first due to overwhelming demand, but it now seems to have things mostly under control and is skyrocketing in popularity. This appears to be primarily due to a couple of different reasons. For one, the Shotgun Farmers Xbox price is just $10, making it a relatively inexpensive investment and one of the cheapest new games available on the Xbox Live Marketplace. And finally, the game has been promoted heavily by QaziTV on TikTok.
QaziTV's TikTok presence is quite likely the biggest factor for Shotgun Farmers' surprise success. Just five hours ago, QaziTV uploaded a TikTok about how the game was currently the top paid game on the Xbox Live Marketplace, and that TikTok alone has over 800,000 views at the time of this writing. Other Shotgun Farmer TikTok videos have surpassed 1 million views, so it's safe to say that the controversial social media platform is helping the game reaching a significantly wider audience than it would have otherwise.
QaziTV's TikTok videos are also a great way to learn about future plans for Shotgun Farmers. Fans can expect PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch versions of Shotgun Farmers at some point (with planned cross-play support), along with new content for the game on existing platforms. For example, QaziTV has started work on a Gun Game-style mode for Shotgun Farmers called Crop Swap.
Shotgun Farmers is enjoying a lot of surprise success right now, but if developer QaziTV is able to keep the game supported with regular content updates, there's no reason why it can't reach the same kind of success as other games that have blown up partly thanks to social media, like Fall Guys or Among Us. Time will tell, but it will definitely be interesting to see what happens with the game moving forward.
Shotgun Farmers is out now for PC and Xbox One, with PS4 and Switch versions also in development.