The Resident Evil 4 remake eclipses the previous record-holder by a wide margin as the series' most successful Steam launch.
With its most successful Steam launch ever, the Resident Evil 4 remake set a new record for the series and vastly outperformed the prior mark. This impressive feat suggests that the game's popularity may match its overwhelmingly positive critical reception. Reviews of the Resident Evil 4 remake have praised it as an amazing experience that successfully and without making many concessions modernizes Capcom's classic.
Beginning with the Resident Evil 2 remake, which peaked at over 74,000 players in 2019, the series' concurrent Steam player record has now been broken three times in the past four years. Two years later, Resident Evil Village boasted more than 106,000 active Steam players, pushing the limits of PC popularity even further. The Resident Evil 4 remake has since managed to top that feat.
The latest Capcom game reached a peak of 140,240 concurrent Steam players on March 24 at around 8 a.m. PST, according to data from SteamDB. Less than 24 hours had passed when the Resident Evil 4 remake accomplished this. Since the new Resident Evil game is still around the 135,000 mark as of this writing, there may still be time for it to break this record once fans in North and South America get off work. While most AAA games tend to peak in this metric on release day.For context, Capcom data indicates that as of late 2022, all versions of the original game had sold over 12 million copies. As a result, the game already has a sizable built-in audience of likely working fans who may later today increase the number of concurrent Steam players.
The Resident Evil 4 remake is currently among the top ten most popular Steam games based on concurrent player peak for the 24-hour period ending March 24. It comes in at number five, just ahead of Grand Theft Auto 5, but far behind PUBG: Battlegrounds, which boasted about twice as many players during the observation period as Capcom's most recent game.
With Capcom recently announcing the first free DLC for the Resident Evil 4 remake as part of its March 24 launch celebrations, this wildly successful launch appears to be just the beginning of the Japanese publisher's roadmap. Given that some beloved ancillary content from the original game is still missing from the remake's day-one release, that probably won't be the only add-on to be made available.
Resident Evil 4 is available now on PC, PS4, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S.