The remake of Resident Evil 4 was the most successful Steam launch ever for the series, breaking the previous record by a huge amount. This is a big deal, and it shows that the game may do as well in sales as it has in reviews, which have been overwhelmingly positive.
Reviewers have called the Resident Evil 4 remake a phenomenal experience that updates Capcom’s classic game without making too many changes.
The record for the most people playing the same game at the same time on Steam has been broken three times in the last four years, starting with the remake of Resident Evil 2, which had over 74,000 players at its peak in 2019.
Resident Evil Village kept pushing the limits of PC popularity by having more than 106,000 Steam players at the same time two years later. The Resident Evil 4 remake now beats that record.
Do you know that the 2023 remake of Resident Evil 4 was well-received by critics in the week leading up to its release? This wasn’t too surprising, given the success of 2005 original. But the bonus arcade mode called “The Mercenaries,” which was known for being hard and fun, wasn’t in the horror-action game:
According to data from SteamDB, the most people playing Capcom’s latest game at the same time on Steam was 140,240 at 8 a.m. PST on March 24. When this happened, the Resident Evil 4 remake had been out for less than 24 hours.
Most AAA games reach their peak in this metric on the day they come out, but as of this writing, the new Resident Evil game is still hovering around the 135,000 mark, so it could still break this record once fans in North and South America get off work.
Capcom data shows that all versions of the original game sold more than 12 million copies by the end of 2022. This means that the game already has a pretty big audience of likely working fans who might add to the number of people playing it at the same time on Steam later today.
Based on the number of people playing at the same time for the 24 hours ending March 24, the remake of Resident Evil 4 is one of the top 10 most popular Steam games right now.
It comes in at number five, just above Grand Theft Auto 5, but far behind PUBG: Battlegrounds, which had about twice as many players as Capcom’s newest game during the time period looked at.
This hugely successful launch seems to be just the beginning for Capcom, which just announced the first free DLC for the Resident Evil 4 remake as part of the March 24 launch party.
That probably won’t be the only add-on that comes out, since some fan-favorite extras from the original game are still missing from the version that comes out on day one. Resident Evil 4 is now out for PC, PS4, PS5, and Xbox X/S.