Hi-Fi Rush has beat Forspoken in the Steam charts, reflecting the critical and audience response to both exclusives.
Now, it should come as no surprise that as of this writing, the actual top seller on Steam this week remains their hardware, the Steam Deck. Valve’s first successful device still has high pent-up demand, that Valve has yet to fully satisfy. Hopefully Valve can get their global distribution together well enough that we can make clearer assessments and comparison to where they are in the industry compared to veterans Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft.
Hi-Fi Rush came in at a respectable number 8, and it still didn’t’ sell as well as the Dead Space Remake, which took the number 3 and 7 slots respectively. However, Forspoken is not even on the top 10, indicating that the reception the game received at launch has damaged its prospects as a product.
According to Game Infinitus, Hi-Fi Rush’s performance was particularly surprising because it can be easily acquired if you have Game Pass, which would cost considerably less than a full retail purchase. But it seems that the people who bought Hi-Fi Rush on Steam may play primarily on that platform, or may have a PlayStation 5 instead of an Xbox Series console.
Hi-Fi Rush is perhaps the Xbox Developer_Direct’s first immediate success. Microsoft, Bethesda Softworks, and Tango Gameworks were successful in keeping everything about the game secret until the last minute, and that paid off in a successful reveal in the show. (And we did try to spoil it.) The brilliant decision to release the game immediately after the Direct also proved gratifying to the Xbox players who were still going to have to wait weeks or even months for the other games.
It would have been harder to convince Xbox Series gamers to buy Forspoken. The Steam version did have some performance issues at launch, that were not present on the PlayStation 5 version. Either version of the game would also be plagued with problems fundamental to its game design. There may have been a lot of online noise about the game’s dialogue, but that negativity was overblown as there were real options to tone the dialogue down. If more people chose to skip Forspoken for that reason, there were other better reasons for them to at least delay buying it.
In today’s market, it is credible to expect that games will be better later, so as consumers, gamers can choose to skip games they were interested in to see if they will improve down the line. Perhaps Forspoken can pull off the redemption narrative Cyberpunk 2077 or No Man’s Sky were able to pull off. But that would depend on the interest of its publisher, Square Enix. Square Enix gave PlatinumGames a year to work on Babylon’s Fall, and that just wasn’t enough time.
