79 concurrent players. That’s the number staring back at me right now on SteamDB for a game sitting at 92% positive across 444 reviews with a 50% launch discount. Something’s not adding up, and it’s worth paying attention.

Airborne Empire — the follow-up to The Wandering Band’s BAFTA-nominated Airborne Kingdom — left Early Access today and immediately slashed its price to $14.99 (down from $29.99). It’s an open-world RPG city-builder where you pilot a flying settlement across biomes, manage lift and weight distribution, recruit bird allies, and shoot down sky pirates. Think SimCity with physics anxiety and a combat system.

And that combat is the key upgrade. One player with 66 hours logged wrote that the addition of fighting “made the game better and not distracted from the story and overall game play” — exactly the worry longtime fans carried from the predecessor. Weapons range from auto-firing defensive towers to tesla coils, and PC Gamer’s early impressions called the game “a solid challenge for my balancing skills” — both literally in keeping the city level and figuratively in juggling its many progression systems.

The 1.0 launch adds a snow biome with a new boss fight and a jet engine for high-speed flight. Over the course of Early Access, the game also introduced Hard Mode, Pacifist Mode, Creative Mode, and a 20-stage Survival campaign.

The founders — Frederik Gareau and Zachary Mumbach — carry AAA pedigrees from Dead Space, Battlefield, and Star Wars. This isn’t a hobby project. It’s a studio that already proved it could execute on a weird, wonderful premise.

So why 79 players? Launch day for an indie sequel, even one with strong reviews, doesn’t come with a marketing budget. The discount helps. The word of mouth hasn’t caught up yet. If you’ve been looking for a city-builder that does something genuinely different — and doesn’t punish you for it — this is your signal.

Sources