Strong Start for Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero and Metaphor: ReFantazio

Three games from Japan had extremely strong launches last week: Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero, Metaphor: ReFantazio and Silent Hill 2. Meanwhile, Thronefall (GrizzlyGames), Undisputed (Plaion) and Starship Troopers: Extermination (Knights Peak) have left Early Access.

Last week, new games from Japan once again dominated the activity charts, but not only. Spike Chunsoft and Bandai Namco Entertainment had a great start with Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero. On Steam alone, 122,554 concurrent users (CCU) were counted, which is by far the best start for a fighting game on the distribution platform - apart from MultiVersus (free-to-play). Street Fighter 6 reached almost 70,000 concurrent users, Tekken 8 nearly 50,000 and Mortal Kombat 1 around 38,000. Dragon Ball: Sparking! is also by far the strongest CCU game in the Dragon Ball franchise and the third highest CCU game for publisher Bandai Namco, behind Dark Souls III (129,975) and Elden Ring (953,426). Bandai Namco Entertainment has not yet disclosed the performance of Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero on other platforms.

Metaphor: ReFantazio, the new JRPG from Atlus and Sega, also got off to a strong start. 85,961 concurrent players were tracked by SteamDB. No other Atlus game has been more successful in this metric. Metaphor: ReFantazio is ahead of Persona 3 Reload (45,002), Persona 5 Royal (35,474) and Persona 4 Golden (29,984). In addition, the publisher announced that the game has already reached the one million mark across all platforms (digital + physical) within the first 24 hours of launch. This is the fastest selling game ever released by Atlus. This record was previously held by Persona 3 Reloaded, which sold one million copies worldwide in its first week, making Metaphor: ReFantazio the fastest-selling game in Atlus history.

The remake of Silent Hill 2 gave Konami the third-highest CCU in the company's history on Steam with 23,676 (behind Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel and Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain), despite the game having been available via Advanced Access the week before. However, Silent Hill 2 does not come close to the CCU peaks of Capcom's Resident Evil remakes (RE2: 74,227, RE3: 60,293, RE4: 168,191).

Several titles also left Early Access. Thronefall, from Berlin-based GrizzlyGames, reached 4,641 CCU with the launch of version 1.0, still a little behind the previous Early Access peak of 6,723 CCU 14 months earlier. Still, a really good result. Similarly, the boxing game Undisputed by Steel City Interactive and Deep Silver (Plaion) reached 3,897 CCU after the end of Early Access. The peak was 7,433 almost two years ago. Starship Troopers: Extermination by Offworld and Knights Peak (My.Games) started with 2,501, but is behind the previous peak of 16,372 17 months ago.

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