Square Enix today revealed that Outriders, the looter-shooter sci-fi RPG that launched at the beginning of April, had managed to attain a fairly high number of players in just a month. According to the company, Outriders has over 3.5 million unique players in its first month. Thanks to this success, the publisher plans to invest a lot in the game in the future.
A Square Enix press release said the game was “poised to be the company’s next big franchise.” Jon Brooke, Co-Head of Studio at Square Enix External Studios is quoted in the release as saying, “Launching a new game IP is never easy and we remain very grateful for the community’s support and feedback – we continue to listen carefully and want to assure everyone that we are committed to improving and enhancing the experience in the coming weeks and months. We also look forward to expanding on OUTRIDERS in the future.”
Part of the reason the game did so well is likely because of the boost that came from launching on Xbox Game Pass. Outriders players apparently average over 30 hours of playtime, with 120 million hours played in total. The developers also revealed on Twitter which percentage of the players played each of the four classes. Trickster is the most popular, though only by a small margin — for reference, 28% of players play Trickster, while 22% play Devastator, the least popular class.
Outriders didn’t really have the smoothest launch, with server and login issues meaning several players weren’t able to play the game for several days. It may not have been the most disastrous launch ever, but it still cast a pall over what was otherwise a fun game. There were also complaints about inventory wipes amongst players that, at the time of writing, still haven’t been restored. But it appears that didn’t have too bad of an effect on the game’s numbers.
Source: Square Enix
