Hello Kitty Island Adventure: City Town is #10 on Steam’s Top Sellers chart as of April 16. It carries a “New Release” badge and a “Featured Win” laurel. It costs $24.99. And at press time, exactly zero people are playing it.

The game’s two user reviews are both rated positive. Neither contains a single word about the game itself. Both are massive walls of Unicode characters arranged into elaborate ASCII art — technically thumbs-up, functionally useless.

Before calling this a phantom launch, it’s worth understanding what’s actually happening. City Town is DLC for the base Hello Kitty Island Adventure, sold as a separate store page (app 4055140). Players who buy the expansion still launch through the original game executable — which currently shows roughly 626 concurrent players, according to Steam data. The zero on City Town’s page is a tracking artifact, not an indictment.

The #10 chart position is real, though. Valve’s Steamworks documentation states that Top Sellers rankings aggregate all revenue — DLC, microtransactions, and base game purchases — with extra weight on the trailing three hours. At $24.99 a copy, a concentrated wave of purchases from existing fans is enough to chart. The base game’s all-time peak of 8,393 concurrent players suggests there’s a genuine audience.

And by early accounts, the content is substantial. An impressions piece from XboxEra’s Playday — written by someone with 60-plus hours in the base game — describes City Town as “a fairly big expansion” packing a player-run café, new characters, puzzle rooms in “The Sewers,” and a friendship system. The reviewer called it “a no-brainer of a pickup” for existing fans.

So the chart position isn’t inflated. The zero-player count is a Steam quirk. The reviews are just unhelpful. Somewhere between storefront tracking gaps and two very enthusiastic ASCII artists, a seemingly solid expansion is having a deeply strange launch day.

Sources