Getting your game noticed is a tricky business when you have to punch through the noise of the more than 10,000 new Steam games releasing each year. Young Horses, the developer of Bugsnax and Octodad, have found itself in an even trickier spot: Thanks to Google, people are expecting a Bugsnax sequel that doesn't exist.
"We are not working on a Bugsnax sequel right now and I need AI bs to stop telling kids we are based on a wiki ideas fanfic," Young Horses co-founder and president Philip Tibitoski tweeted earlier today. It turns out, through the wonders of algorithmic search result curation, Google's featured snippets have been informing people that Bugsnax 2 will be releasing in October 2024, despite the fact that neither Young Horses or any other developer are making it.
Like, this is very sweet. But also…what? pic.twitter.com/jlhoTscZiTSeptember 13, 2024
I just checked myself, and sure enough, googling "bugsnax 2 release date" or "is there a bugsnax 2 coming out" presents me with the helpful information that "Bugsnax 2 the City is an American puzzle game developed by Young Horses and being released on October 15th, 2024." Except, to reiterate, it isn't. Because there is no Bugsnax 2 in development.
Google's source for the spurious release date is a page someone wrote for Bugsnax 2 on Idea Wiki, a fan wiki for, well, ideas. "This is a fanon wiki, and just like fan-fiction wikis, this one has a variety of fan created ideas on here," Idea Wiki's home page reads. "These include potential sequels and new series that have yet to exist." It's just a wiki where people can dump whatever hypothetical piece of media they might dream up. In other words, I could add a page to Idea Wiki about a Sonic the Hedgehog sequel I just thought up where he goes so fast that he slips the tethers of spacetime and is cast adrift, alone, forever spiraling along whatever lightless corridor stretches between our universe and the next, and there's a chance that Google's featured snippets will mistake it for a genuine upcoming Sonic game.
Of course, because there are plenty of people who aren't expecting that Google might be scooping up info about pretend video games and presenting them as fact—because it probably shouldn't be—they're left without any immediate reason to doubt the truth of whatever's put at the top of their search results. We've been trained to intuitively recognize whatever's up there as the most important info, after all. Why would the text be slightly bigger, if not as proof of its authority?
In a follow-up tweet, Tibitoski posted a screenshot of a Google review for Bugsnax written by a player who says they "started playing when I was 6, November 24 2023 and now I'm 7" who, after describing playing the game with their dad, writes "I might talk to you soon when Bugsnax 2 The City is out."
"Like, this is very sweet," Tibitosky said. "But also…what?"
Sure, it's not as overtly absurd as the times when Google's AI overview tells people to eat glue pizza, but I have a hard time not seeing it as a dire omen when the company that's been a gateway to the sum total of human knowledge has inadvertently let the information pool get some light poisoning. At least the children are excited.
Bugsnax 2 the City is not releasing on October 15, 2024.
