We have some news that will surely come as a surprise to gamers who watched everything that played out, before, during, and after last week’s launch of Redfall on PC and Xbox Series X|S.
TrueAchievements’ Xbox Gameplay Chart report dated May 9, 2023 has found that Redfall had a huge launch on Xbox. TrueAchievements does not share numbers, but states that it is already the second biggest launch on Xbox so far. In this regard, it is only second to Atomic Heart’s launch.
Subsequently, Redfall ranks number three on the charts, behind Fortnite and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. Yes, that also means that Redfall did better on Xbox than the much better reviewed Star Wars Jedi Survivor, that launched on the same week.
We’ll quote TrueAchievements here on what they think of Redfall’s launch:
“Just below these two rivals, we see this week’s first new entry, and it’s Arkane’s Redfall. A mixed but somewhat negative-skewed critical response — including our own Redfall review, which called it “a game confused” — hasn’t stopped loads of players from jumping into the game to make up their own minds, with the vampire FPS appearing on over 13% of accounts in the chart’s data pool in the last week. That lands it second place in the biggest Xbox launches of 2023 so far according to our data (only behind Atomic Heart), so all that remains to be seen now is whether Redfall can stick around for more than a week or two.”
Perhaps this news shouldn’t be as surprising as it seems. In spite of the poor critical reception, Redfall was promoted as one of the two major Xbox releases of this year, alongside Starfield.
There were also quite a few reviewers who weren’t negative on Redfall at all. But perhaps, the most likely reason Redfall saw players is the simple fact that it was on Game Pass.
So, Xbox Game Pass owners did not have to shell out anything extra last week to give the game a try at all. It is considerably easier for those subscribers to give the game a try to see if they would enjoy it in spite of the flaws, and possibly check back on it a few months later as well.
For better or worse, this also wouldn’t be the first time a game has seen financial success in spite of questions of performance or bad reviews. It’s notable that Microsoft hasn’t said anything about this, but it’s possible that we could get a press release later if it is a notable enough financial success for the Xbox division, critical reception aside.
As TrueAchievements stated, what will really show how gamers feel about Redfall is how long those community of players stick around. If Arkane’s bet that an audience for this type of game exists, that will be the motivation to pour money into fixing it to grow and sustain that community. Now we’ll see if that kind of community exists for this game at all.
