Dragon’s Dogma 2, despite catastrophically bad optimization and very negative reviews, has already broken 200k concurrent players on Steam.
Horizon Forbidden West, a purportedly flawless port with very positive reviews, has so far topped out at just over 25k concurrent, roughly half the peak achieved by the first Horizon.
Things can certainly change. Also, Horizon is a two year old game at this point, although still one of the best looking games in existence.
But those numbers are anemic, especially in the wake of Sony’s last PC release (Helldivers 2) hitting almost half a million concurrent players.
Is it possible that the Sweet Baby Inc. story penetrated the mainstream far enough to influence consumer behavior? I’m not aware of any formal connection between HFW and SBI, but it does seem like gamers are becoming more conscious of both the woke taint on AAA and their own ability to avoid it.
Who knows. Maybe it’s just a mirage. A man can dream.
I'm legitimately thinking of double dipping on Ghosts of Tsushima to get to actually play the multiplayer this go around.
Because adding a wierd, super hard multi mode 6 months after release to a single player game just guaranteed it was dead in weeks unless you had a group of friends to bring. Which sucked because it was really fun.
But its easily a 40$ game. The open world is tacked on and repetitive, but it also offers you basically nothing you need after a bit short of achievements. The combat and story is top tier and if you cut the padding its a solid 15 hour single player experience (no idea about the expansion, didn't get it).