Star Twitch streamer and former Counter-Strike: Global Offensive pro Michael “shroud” Grzesiek is in love with FPS game Battalion 1944.
“Goddamn, that game is so fun,” shroud said after streaming it yesterday. “I really hope it doesn’t die again. I really hope it actually goes somewhere.”
Shroud’s been playing Battalion in every stream for a week now. He started playing it on May 24, which was when the game’s full release went live on Steam after being in early access for over a year. The game’s standard mode features two teams of five playing against each other in an arena, which resembles CS:GO and might explain why shroud likes it so much.
Battalion was far from popular for the past year. The game blew up when its early access version went live in February 2018, but its player base died down every month until it reached an average of 11 players online with a peak of 54 in March 2019. Battalion’s full release made those numbers increase a lot, and the game now has an average of 2,000 players online and peaks at a bit over 4,000, according to statistics website Steamcharts.
Even though shroud is one of the most popular streamers on Twitch, easily gathering over 18,000 concurrent viewers every time he goes live, he believes he doesn’t have the power to keep Battalion’s player base high just because he’s playing the game.
“And people are saying like, ‘don’t worry Shroud, as long as you play it, you’ll keep it alive,’” shroud said. “That’s not true. I don’t know why people believe that.”
Shroud’s number of average viewers hasn’t changed since he started streaming Battalion 1944.
