Crab Game is popular and leaking IP addresses

On November 1, popular streamer xQc was the victim of a potential DDOS attack that disconnected him from the internet. Prior to his connectivity issues, he had been streaming a new indie oddity called Crab Game. Norwegian Youtube personality and game developer Daniel “Dani” Sooman released Crab Game on Steam on October 29, and it is the likely source of xQc’s troubles. Dani confirmed the issue in a statement on Twitter.

(1/3) If you’re a streamer you should probably stay away from public lobbies in Crab Game for a few days, until I update it, as you risk getting DDOS’d currently. I apologize to everyone who expeirenced this, I’m an idiot.

— Dani (@DaniDevYT) November 2, 2021

The Crab Game developer previously produced the multiplayer survival game Muck. Dani created that project out of spite in response to a Youtube comment that claimed Dani couldn’t make his own multiplayer survival game. Both Muck and Crab Game launched for free on Steam, and Dani brought a similar kind of creative energy to both projects.

“This stupid trend is dying faster than my will to live, so we have to finish this [next] game quickly,” Dani explained in a Youtube video. “So let’s make an entire multiplayer game with proximity chat and nine game modes and 30 maps in two weeks.”

Less than a day later, Dani posted his warning that streamers should not play Crab Game until he released a fix.

DDOS stands for ‘distributed denial of service’. It is a cyberattack where nefarious users wield a network to spam and overwhelm a target with fake traffic. DDOS attacks are increasingly common, and data from Netscout predicts the number of attacks will reach reach 11 million by the end of 2021.

Crab Game reached over 18,000 players over the first 24 hours of its launch. It reached an all-time peak of over 38,000 players, according to data tracking from SteamDB. During that same 24-hour period, Crab Game had over 38,000 viewers on Twitch. It reached a peak of over 211,000 viewers on Twitch on October 31, according to TwitchTracker.