How Many Dudes Sold 300,000 Copies, Update 1.1 Lands October 29

Butterscotch Shenanigans’ roguelike autobattler How Many Dudes has sold more than 300,000 copies in the three months since it launched on Steam on July 30, 2026. The studio says update 1.1 lands on Thursday, October 29 with seven new Sports Dudes, a Challenge Mode and a reworked Upgrades system.

Autobattlers are games where you build a roster and then watch it fight, and How Many Dudes is a loud example of the type. You recruit an army of Dudes, stack their strange abilities together and let them take on increasingly ridiculous opponents. The store page frames the goal as finding out how many Dudes it takes to beat up a gorilla, a thousand toddlers or a horse-sized duck.

The new Dudes are Soccer, Basketball, Football, Hockey, Tennis, Coach and Broadcaster Dudes, which takes the roster from the 42 Dudes the game launched with to 49. More interesting than the head count is what those seven do to the math. The studio counts 850,668 possible five-Dude teams at launch and 1,906,884 once the Sports Dudes land, a little more than double the combinations. Update 1.1 also turns Upgrades into permanent stat boosts that carry between runs, so a build you like no longer starts from scratch every time. The studio frames the new decisions in its usual blunt style, for example whether your team should get Creatine or Ibuprofen.

The announcement says nothing about price or platforms. How Many Dudes costs $14.99 on Steam and runs on Windows. The studio also built an official Steam Input profile so it plays on Steam Deck, which matters because the game was designed around mouse input and clicking through stat screens. The Steam page lists 3,202 reviews, and two days after launch the studio said the game was sitting at a 90%-plus positive review score. There is still a free demo on Steam, and progress from the demo carries into the full game.

Butterscotch Shenanigans is three brothers, Adam, Seth and Sam Coster, who have been making games together for 14 years. Crashlands, Crashlands 2 and Levelhead are their better-known games. How Many Dudes launched with a 35% discount after a demo that had been downloaded more than 500,000 times, and the studio called it its most successful launch ever. If you enjoy small-studio oddities, our Indie Spotlight rounds up four more.

The 300,000 figure is mostly a launch-week number, and the studio’s own posts make that plain: it sold 100,000 copies in the first 50 hours and peaked at 9,636 concurrent players on Steam. Steam’s public player API showed 502 people in the game at 5:19 p.m. Central on Friday, October 23, well below that launch peak. So October 29 is the date to watch. A doubled roster and permanent stat upgrades are exactly what pulls a lapsed player back for one more run, and the studio has to get that run out of a much smaller daily crowd than the one it launched with.

Update 1.1 arrives on Steam on October 29, PC only. The free demo is still up if you want to see whether the Sports Dudes fit your run before you spend again.

Edited by Kerwin Stewart, Editor-in-Chief · How we report