Lethal Company

Lethal Company is a cooperative survival horror game developed and published solo by American indie developer Zeekerss, released in Steam Early Access on October 23, 2023. Players take the role of contracted workers for a mysterious entity known as "The Company," tasked with collecting scrap and valuables from abandoned, industrialized moons while avoiding environmental hazards, deadly traps, and a variety of hostile creatures. Teams of one to four players must return to their ship before midnight and meet quota requirements by selling collected items. The game features proximity-based voice chat, procedurally arranged hazard placement, and a deliberately oppressive atmosphere that rewards tight cooperation and punishes greed.

Lethal Company is built on the Unity engine and uses Unity Netcode for GameObjects (NGO) as its networking framework, with Facepunch.Steamworks as the transport layer. This means the game operates on a host-client P2P model: one player acts as the host and their machine serves as the authoritative server for all connected clients. Session discovery and NAT traversal are handled through Steam's networking infrastructure (Steam Datagram Relay / SDR), so players generally do not need to port-forward to host a session. The host's connection quality, hardware, and geographic position directly determine the experience for all connected players. Dissonance VOIP provides proximity-sensitive in-game voice chat layered on top of the same networking stack.

Lethal Company became a viral phenomenon immediately after launch, reaching 100,000 concurrent Steam players in November 2023 and peaking at over 239,000 concurrent players in December 2023 — a remarkable figure for an indie Early Access title. The game won Best Early Access Game at the 2024 Golden Joystick Awards. As of early 2026 the game maintains a stable player base of several thousand concurrent users. Zeekerss continues to develop the game solo with periodic content updates.