In the modern world of video games, there are many ways to gauge the success of a product. The immediate one is the sales numbers it has upon launch. Critical acclaim is also something that many developers/publishers seek. However, another way to see if players are interested in your title is by seeing how many people are all at once on Steam. If you launch it on Steam, you can very easily see how many people are playing it at any given moment. For example, Resident Evil 4 Remake launched today, and not too long into its release, it was already compiling big numbers on the Valve platform.
As of early this morning, Resident Evil 4 Remake had over 125,000 players concurrently, according to Steam DB. That means they were all playing at the same time. Now, that doesn’t mean that only 125,000 gamers have bought the Steam version of the game. It simply means that at that one point in time, many people were playing it at once. But that’s still a huge number because the game hasn’t even been out for 12 hours, and well over a hundred thousand people have already hopped onto Steam to play it.
If you wanted to gauge how well that compares to previous entries, the newest remake is about 20,000 higher than the last main game and over 50,000 players higher than the RE2 Remake on their respective launch days. That shows how much gamers have developed an interest in the franchise over the last several years.
What else does this tell us? First, it tells us that PC players wanted the game. Second, if the Steam version is doing this well, it goes to reason that the console versions of the title are doing just as well, if not much better. While the PC is usually the “standard bearer” for how far you can push games, many people love to play titles like these on a console. That goes double when you have consoles like the PS5 and the Xbox Series X.
So while we won’t make any definitive guesses for how well the remake is doing sales-wise, we can easily say that it’s likely well on its way to being a million-seller and possibly well beyond that.
The hype around the remake has been strong ever since it was announced, so it’s nice to know the payoff was rewarded. Plus, people love Leon S. Kennedy and will support him however they can.