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.
Horizon Forbidden West -- and by proxy, the Horizon series -- would have been right up my alley had it not been woke trash. Open-world, post-apoc survival game with robo-dinos? Count me in!
But then Insomniac decided they didn't want to promote guns in their game, so they removed all the pistols, rifles, and handheld projectiles other than the bow and a heavy machine gun you could lift off of downed dinos, because "we already did that in Killzone".
Then they made their lead female look like a tranny, and removed the more welcoming aesthetic she was originally supposed to have.
Then they made all the NPCs hideous, added in a bunch of "diversity", turned their lead female gay, made the over-arching female characters who drove the story forward girl-bosses who were also gay, and made almost all the straight White males evil, stupid, weak or fodder.
Everything about that game other than the combat and graphics are off-putting and disgusting. If anyone remotely has as much disdain for those kind of DEI-influenced products as I do, then it's no wonder why people have opted out of supporting them.
It's a real shame, too, because if Horizon was made honestly and authentically for its audience, I would probably dip back in every once in a while just to do meaningless side-quests for fun, sort of like how I occasionally go back to playing Death's Stranding because it has such an engaging gameplay loop and none of the ESG-nonsense that other AAA titles are riddled with.