Bandai Namco, the seventh-largest video game publisher in the world by revenue, has recently published a new vampire-theme entry called Code Vein. Considering that the company has launched games with a souls-like genre before, including the Dark Souls series developed by FromSoft, it is not entirely a newbie in this genre. Nevertheless, its latest video game is surprisingly shown to be more prevalent on PC than its previous release, the Dark Souls series.
As of now, the latest game has registered concurrent players of up to 33,130 since its launch last Friday. These figures are the peak of the game since its launch and are responsible for positioning the game in the upper rank of the game developer’s PC release.
The previous game released by the company, the Dark Souls, had never reached the same massive popularity as that of the latest entry, even though much discussion and talk has circled around the digital world about the previous game. The original edition of the game, “Prepare to Die,” has an all-time peak of only a little over 11,000 players, while the “Remastered” edition peak at about 24,505 players. Even with the combination of both figures from the two games, the numbers would only result in almost the same numbers as that of the latest game’s concurrent players.
The higher number of the Remastered edition would probably due to the impact of the discount offered by the publisher. Gamers that owned the game series’ original version can purchase the subsequent version with up to 50% discount when it was released. This purchasing behavior would mean that most of the players that own the following edition are the same players that owned the original game, resulting in an overlapping of the figures.
Nevertheless, the sequels of the Dark Souls game have substantially done better on PC compared to its predecessor, with the second sequel reaching a peak count of over 79,000 players. The third sequel, on the other hand, successfully bagged in over 129,000 players ranking it number one.
On steam, however, there is another game released by the same developer that has done better than Code Vein at the moment, and that is Dragon Ball FighterZ. SteamCharts reported that this game has concurrent players with a peak of over 44,000.
Though the numbers of concurrent gamers cannot be counted as the number of actual sales, these figures can still be used as a good estimation for the sales, and subsequently applied as a reliable tool to represent the overall popularity of the game.
