Sony’s PC port of Returnal failed to attract gamers. The title, which was quite popular on the PS5, seems to have fallen out of favor with PC audiences.
The PC port of Returnal was released a few days ago and drew no crowds, as did the PC versions of Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection and Sackboy: The Great Adventure from October. There can be several reasons for this.
Another Sony port with poor activity results
According to statistics collected by SteamDB, Steam The Returnal version only managed to amass 6,691 players at a time, at best. In turn, the average activity score varies between 3,000 and 6,000 players. It should be noted that the game was also released on the Epic Games Store, but it can be assumed with a high probability that the result on the Epic platform will not exceed the result obtained on Steam.
The first game ported from PlayStation consoles to PC was Days Gone, which took place in May 2021. Since then, to the delight of gamers, the company has become more willing to port its greatest hits, which were previously only only available on PS4 and PS5. . consoles Results for other Sony ports in terms of number of concurrently active players can be found below.
With Nathan Drake and Chloe Frazer’s collection of adventures coming to PC with each new game, you may see a dip in interest in Sony ports (here we mean Spider-Man: Miles Morales and Sackboy: The Great Adventure). ). Time will tell if the release of the PC port of The Last of Us: Part I, announced for March 28, will end this losing streak.
What is the problem?
There are several likely reasons for the issue of low interest in the game on launch day.
- Game release during major release season including, Hogwarts Legacy (peak on Steam: a dizzying 879k), as well as the day before the release of Wild Hearts (28 thousand).
- The title represents a rather specialized genre, which is the roguelike: death means restarting the level and losing part of the acquired inventory. The unforgiving gameplay formula may have put off a lot of gamers.They expect fewer challenges from the game.
- The high price tag ($59.99 for a two-year-old game) may have influenced purchase decisions. We can mention here the people potentially interested, i.e. 31 thousand spectators on Twitch in the first 24 hours of the launch.
Returnal was released on April 30, 2021 for PS5 and February 15, 2023 for PC. On consoles, the title garnered rave reviews and was awarded BAFTA Game of the Year. The PS5 version of the game saw high sales.