How come this game is 100-1000 times more popular than near identical games?

[Runner]

As the topic says.
Just curious, because even unique games often struggle to get more than 10k people playing at the same time, here the peak seems to be over 50k and this is in a time when there are like 3 competing "Simulators" out there in just the Supermarket genre, let alone in the "Sell stuff in a store like setting" genre (maybe now like..30? 40?).

Just curious what makes this one unique, since it does not seem to do something very special, whacky or has incredible QoL in comparison (I read some other threads, a LOT of requests for basic functions about info and management).

Any thoughts on in general or why YOU like it?

[ImHelping]

No joke, even before the recent "totally launching soon" discount that would increase the number right now? Even with my own trash talk of room expansion getting way too grindy to the point you would unlock every product before you have comfy room for every product?

The overall simplicity.

Shop that does not take an hour to run around at it's largest. Instead of ending up seeing only 2% of your store from an office cubicle corner. A good setup once you have the room can let you view 80% of your customer ant colony from by the light switch (That said I also ended up with a 'vertical' arrangement of checkouts with waist high freezers by the windows, much better sight lines than my early setups)

Unlocks are just unlocking new products to sell. Everything else is for sale by default.

Customers are only angry if you didn't have a product they wanted to buy on the shelf, they felt it was overpriced, or you short change them by a few cents because the game sensibly blocks trying to short change them a dollar to hundreds of dollars on purpose. And even then they still buy a bunch and only take a penalty on your experience gains instead of run screaming out of the store adding a notch to your game over meter (see also; every restaurant manager where food barely matters compared to babysitting)

You can just zone out and do it instead of needing to track a tech tree spreadsheet worse than modded X-Com. *Glances at other suggested by the algorithm recently market games demanding you unlock air conditioning halfway through a tech tree image to keep customers from crying*

The amount of problems in this game are less than the alternatives, due to the ironic blessing of "Less things to ♥♥♥♥ up in the first place."

Also if you ever get super bored, turns out you can (currently) crack open the saves and just edit your money in a text editor. I expect I may do that soon once 4x4 room sections are in the 150k to 1.5 million each range, instead of the 150-200k combined for a full row expansion on one side of the store worth of room. (Storage back room upgrades are much cheaper)

Saves are also very tiny and super optimized even if the game sure isn't. An endgame shop save folder is gonna be 5 megabytes or less, and that is with it having the last 5 save states as backup in there.

I bring that up because the reason I have a 1tb overkill C drive on top of a pair of 4tb D and F drives is from past experience where games would sneak terrible optimization over 4 GIGS per save folder for a single autosave slot clones from the game install folder to a user folder it is supposed to delete on exit. bugging out deleting it on exit, clogging my then tiny C drive instead of my huge D drive at the time, and the devs throwing a tantrum "We are doing it to save you ram!!!! SSD wear is a myth!!! bigger SSDS are cheap shut up!" when filing the bug report about having to manually delete 4-8+ gigs of clone saves, as well as theorizing that is why everyone was having that game freeze for a hot second the first time you load your saves, copy/pasting the folder in the background before you get to play.

[zen_aki]

A number of reasons come to mind:
1- a relative cheap price tag for a game that is early access.

2- its name is generic and says what it is on the tin. ex: you have spam in a can and it's called "Canned Spam" and not something like "Dr. Revin's Compressed Meat Product" or something along that line.

3- (the most important one in my opinion) exposure as it has been played by YouTubers, Twitch Streamers and even Vtubers. I mean, 10 months ago, Markiplier played it. Of his youtube channels 37.5 million subscribers, the video for part 1 has nearly 9 million views. the GameGrumps with their 5.44 Million subscribers have a video of the game 11 months ago and it has 1.1 million views. Going on the conservative side and say that all 1.1 million views also watched Markiplier's, that is still 9 million people that were exposed to the game by YouTube. More recently, a VTuber by the name of MasaeAnela has been playing it and having silly fun like stacking empty boxes in a corner and naming her first employee Stephano.

4- its reviews on the store page are "Very Positive", so people are likely to try it along with the low price at the moment.

5- curiosity from others who played the other simulators that were looking at "copycat" games and seeing differences either as a hobby because they have a lot of money and/or time to spend.