Dragon’s Dogma 2 Passes Another Milestone on Steam

Highlights

• Dragon’s Dogma 2 hit 228,000 concurrent Steam players during its launch weekend.
• The fantasy RPG is the first-ever Capcom game to break the 200,000 concurrent player threshold on Valve’s storefront.
• The game’s early success seems unimpeded by the review-bombing campaign over its PC performance and microtransactions, which is still ongoing.

Dragon’s Dogma 2 is the first-ever Capcom game to surpass 200,000 concurrent players on Steam. This achievement further underlines the fantasy RPG’s incredible launch weekend, which Dragon’s Dogma 2 enjoyed in spite of some recent controversies.

Capcom’s latest AAA title was released for PC and consoles on Friday, March 22. While its launch was met with overwhelmingly positive critical scores, the most vocal section of the fandom had a more polarizing reaction to the RPG. This is reflected in the fact that Dragon’s Dogma 2 is currently being review-bombed by Steam users, many of whom are warning others against buying the game due to its poor PC performance and microtransactions.

Despite that backlash, the RPG’s player count keeps rising. According to data scraped by SteamDB, the game had hit 228,585 concurrent PC players during its launch weekend. The peak was recorded on March 23, mere hours after Dragon’s Dogma 2 became Capcom’s most successful PC game by the number of simultaneously active players. The previous record holder was the Resident Evil 4 remake, which peaked at 168,191 concurrent players on Valve’s storefront shortly following its March 2023 debut.

With Dragon’s Dogma 2 now improving on that figure by over 35%, Capcom clearly has a historic hit on its hands. At the same time, the review-bombing campaign appears to still be ongoing, as the Steam impressions of the RPG remain in the “Mixed” category, based on over 32,000 user scores, as of March 24. Capcom has partially addressed the Dragon’s Dogma 2 player backlash shortly following the game’s release, saying that it is presently working on better optimizing some of its CPU processes, which it identified as the main reason for its less-than-ideal performance.

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The company also hand-waived the complaints about the excessive microtransactions by pointing out that they only offer access to things that can be obtained by simply playing the game, thus being safe to ignore. Paid item add-ons have long been a mainstay in Capcom’s single-player games, though they have rarely incurred so much public criticism.

Dragon’s Dogma 2 is the only new release on the list of the top ten most-played Steam games over the weekend of March 23–24. As per usual, the vast majority of that group comprises live-service titles, with Dragon’s Dogma 2 being one of just two exceptions. The other one is the recently resurgent Stardew Valley, which has been enjoying a massive popularity spike following the March 19 release of its 1.6 update.