Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice passes 100,000 concurrent players at its Steam debut

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Check out this debut: Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice arrived on March 22, 2019 for PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC, and within its first hours on Steam it passed the mark of 100,000 players connected at the same time. The recorded peak was over 108,000 people playing simultaneously, a number that made noise for being a Japanese, demanding game with no multiplayer mode at all.

For those who like to compare scoreboards: with that peak, Sekiro became the biggest debut of a new game on Steam in early 2019 and the third biggest for a Japanese game in the platform’s history up to then. Ahead of it were only two heavyweights: Monster Hunter: World, from Capcom, and Dark Souls III, from FromSoftware itself, which had hit about 129,000 concurrent players.

The game was developed by FromSoftware, Hidetaka Miyazaki’s studio, and published by Activision worldwide, with FromSoftware itself handling distribution in Japan. The proposal was different from the Souls formula: no building a character or calling for online help. Here you are Wolf, a shinobi with a prosthetic arm, in a reimagined Sengoku-period Japan, and the fight revolves around the Posture system, deflecting blow after blow until you break the enemy’s guard. It is pure brawl, and the player who does not learn to defend takes a beating.

What came next

The strong PC debut was only the beginning. Sekiro sold more than 2 million copies in its first ten days, passed 5 million in July 2020 and reached more than 10 million in September 2023. Critics embraced it too: the Metacritic average was 90 on PS4, 91 on Xbox One and 88 on PC. In December 2019, the game won Game of the Year at The Game Awards, as well as the equivalent title at that year’s Steam Awards. In October 2020 the Stadia version came out and, at the end of the same month, a free update with new looks for Wolf and a mode to fight the bosses in sequence. Ready to face Isshin?