Adding a singleplayer story to their game may not have doubled its already i. 'We assumed it would have another round of virality,' says Fraser, 'and be like a whole 'nother new thing that people hadn't seen and it could be as big as like the first time they saw anything about Genital Jousting.' 'So that didn't happen,' adds Greenwood, 'and it actually went the way that anyone with some business sense and a head on their shoulders would have expected, which was it performed about as well as the initial launch.' He's quick to add that they don't consider this a failure. But even with that major addition appearing out of nowhere Genital Jousting's final release didn't equal the success it enjoyed during Early Access. At the time I compared it to The Stanley Parable, only you're a penis. It was an unexpected addition, to say the least. They were working on something special for the final launch-a singleplayer mode for their silly-physics party game, an ambitious linear narrative that took its fumblecore mechanics and used them to tell a story about modern manhood. And so Steam kind of made it up to us by including us in Christmas sales and that kind of thing.' For about a year during Genital Jousting's time in Early Access, Free Lives went dark. The Steam user reviews people were happy, they weren't up in arms saying, 'This is a pile of garbage'. They didn't receive a backlash and the game maybe was better than they expected, it received relatively good reviews, that kind of thing. 'They were waiting for some sort of backlash, they weren't sure what would happen themselves. 'Initially Steam did not promote it in certain places because of its adult nature,' says Greenwood. Though one of Valve's reps confirmed it would, they remained cautious at first. After wrapping up work on Broforce, Free Lives reached out to Valve to make sure that a game about penises that have buttholes would be acceptable for their platform. We ended up doing 50% off instead, which is not quite the same thing.' Success wasn't a sure thing for Genital Jousting. 'We wanted to do a two-for-one package and Steam wouldn't give it to us. I think there might have been a Valentine's bump.' 'We did a big Valentine's Day special,' confirms programmer Robbie Fraser. 'A lot of the sales did come in Early Access,' says creative director Evan Greenwood, 'and a lot of that was during things like the Christmas sale which Steam included us in and things like that. Doing the rounds on social media paid off when Steam sales came round. Seemingly everybody on YouTube made a video about, even us.

When it launched in Early Access in late 2016, Genital Jousting became a viral sensation-Gang Beasts with wangs. How a game about dicks sold hundreds of thousands of copies PC Gamer Genital Jousting has sold 354,139 copies so far.

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