Missed again: in the first week of release on Steam, Returnal's peak online reach fell short of 7,000 players

On 15 February, the PC version of the roguelike Returnal was released. However, during the first week of its release on Steam, the game failed to become popular and gather a large online audience.

Here's What We Know

According to SteamDB, the peak online in 24 hours did not even reach 7,000. On Steam, 6,600 people were playing Returnal at the same time. For Sony, this is one of the worst PC releases in history, if we focus exclusively on online.

However, Returnal is still not the worst selling Sony game on PC. For example, Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection, which was released in October 2022, has a similar indicator and did not reach even 8 thousand online peak. But the worst result is still Sackboy: A Big Adventure, which was released in November. The game's online peak was only 610 players.

Although last year's releases Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales and Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered on PC had good results - 14,000 and 66,000 peak online players respectively.

But gamers liked the game. On Steam, Returnal has 81% positive reviews based on 1,256 player reviews. So, despite the low online sales, the project turned out well. Most likely, the low online presence of most Sony games on PC is due to the lack of an advertising campaign that would interest PC gamers in getting to know former PlayStation exclusives.

Flashback

Returnal is a third-person roguelike shooter developed by Housemarque. The game revolves around Selena, an astronaut who crashes on an alien planet and has to fight her way through various environments and defeat creatures to escape. The game features a procedural location generation system that creates unique challenges.

Source: steamdb