Quick answer: Phantom Blade Zero had 650,054 people playing at once on Steam as of 7:25 AM CT Thursday, October 29, according to Steam’s own concurrent player data. That was still its highest count so far, and it put S-GAME’s wuxia action RPG at #3 on Steam’s most played chart, just 581 players behind PUBG and ahead of Dota 2.
The game unlocked Wednesday night on PC and PS5, and it is still climbing. Sony does not publish PS5 player counts, so the 650,000 figure covers Steam only.
Where 650,000 ranks
Here is how Steam’s top four looked at 7:25 AM CT:
- Counter-Strike 2: 1,007,942
- PUBG: Battlegrounds: 650,635
- Phantom Blade Zero: 650,054
- Dota 2: 583,084
Those other three are free-to-play games that have been on the chart for years. Phantom Blade Zero costs $59.99 and is less than a day old. SteamDB also lists it as Steam’s #1 top seller, with a Twitch peak of 69,148 viewers.
GamesRadar reports that only Palworld’s 1.0 launch has drawn a bigger Steam crowd this year, and that Phantom Blade Zero has already passed Hollow Knight: Silksong, Slay the Spire 2 and Terraria to enter Steam’s all-time top 20 for concurrent players. It is also more than double the 276,000 peak Tech4Gamers cites for Crimson Desert.
What players think
Steam user reviews are Very Positive so far, with 86% of 767 English language reviews recommending the game as of Thursday morning. That lines up with critics. The game sits at 88 on Metacritic, where reviewers praised the combat and bosses but not the story.
Demand was visible before launch, too. GamesRadar cites an Alinea Analytics estimate of more than 1 million copies sold before release. Still installing? Our preload guide and PS5 file size story cover how much space you need.
Will it hit 1 million?
New releases usually set their Steam peak on the first weekend, so Sunday, November 1, is the number to watch. The bar for this genre is Black Myth: Wukong, which peaked at about 2.4 million on Steam in 2024.
Our take: Phantom Blade Zero will not touch Wukong, and it does not need to. Wukong was a phenomenon driven by a huge home audience. A $59.99 single player game from a smaller studio pulling 650,000 on a Thursday morning, on one platform, is already a hit by any normal measure. Passing PUBG for #2 looks like a matter of hours. Whether it clears 1 million this weekend is the real question.
Are you playing on PC or PS5? We will update this story with the weekend peak.
Sources: Steam concurrent player data, Steam store page, SteamDB, GamesRadar, Tech4Gamers.
