Although they used to show close to no connection for many years, the fighting game community population continues to rapidly grow on PC with players making the jump from their console brethren, but what exactly are they all playing?
After recently finding out that the PC playerbase for Guilty Gear Strive had reportedly surpassed that on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5, we decided to do some further digging to see what the most popular fighting games on Steam currently are.
Using Steam Charts’ active player data, we were able to chart out the top 10 fighters on the platform using the 30-day average and peak numbers for the titles where there’s some notably wide gaps between the top and bottom of even this small of a sample size.
As has pretty much been the case for years now outside of like the first few months following Strive and Mortal Kombat 11’s launches, Tekken 7 is currently the top dog among traditional fighters on Steam with an average of active players over the past month at 4,437 and peak players at 8,323.
This is likely due to the PC version of Tekken running overall better both offline and online on Steam as opposed to their console counterparts, which led to the competitive community to shift more and more to the computer space — hell, even Evo Online ran the game on PC this year despite Sony themselves owning the tournament series now.
As the newest game on the list, it’s not so surprising to see Guilty Gear retaining its edge over Street Fighter 5 for the number two position with a 2,522 player average and 7,690 peak over the past 30 days.
Something that probably no one ever saw coming up until less than a month ago is that BlazBlue: Central Fiction is now the 4th most popular fighter on Steam thanks to its new rollback netcode beta, which has only been live for three weeks at this point, so those numbers would be even higher if we only counted from when the beta started.
In fact, 8 out of the 10 top titles currently use rollback with Dragon Ball FighterZ and Granblue Fantasy: Versus being the only ones to still used delay-based netplay, although many will still debate whether Tekken 7 counts or not.
One very interesting aspect to take notice of is that the average age of the games on this list is 4.3 years old, and that’s taking into account Strive only being on the market for only 6 months.
This goes to show that publishers and developers were seemingly correct in choosing to support their titles with new content for years, as players will stick around their favorites or come back for big updates like we’re seeing in BlazBlue and Skullgirls.
There is quite the disparity in player counts, however, once you get past the halfway point in the chart with numbers dropping sharply after DBFZ.
Those towards the bottom of the best are generally the oldest games of the bunch, games no longer receiving updates and / or not using rollback netcode though they’re still among the best in the genre.
FighterZ is likely still carried thanks in no small part to the Dragon Ball brand, but DBFZ is also the most popular game to feature Goku and friends on Steam, since it’s surprisingly beating out Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2 on the platform.
If we loosen our definitions of fighting games too just a bit to include arena and platform fighters, the top 10 chart actually changes pretty significantly.
Opening the door to more sub-genres puts four different games into the popularity ranks between Brawlhalla, Naruto Ultimate Ninja Storm 4, Jump Force and Demon Slayer: The Hinokami Chronicles.
What’s extra wild about his is just how high Brawlhalla’s numbers are compared to every other fighter on the list as the number one game overall but also the only platform fighter.
The free-to-play title’s monthly average of 15,249 players is greater than the 2–8 position’s totals combined while its peak of a whopping 26,631 users over the past month at one time on Steam alone eclipses 2nd–5th place combined.
Brawlhalla itself has also been available for over four years now, so how does it manage to pull in this large of a consistent playerbase compared to every other fighter on the platform?
One of the biggest factors in Brawlhalla’s favor as mentioned above is its free-to-play business model that only locks cosmetics behind real money transactions.
This allows for a much wider and arguably younger group of players to pick up the game without worry of needing to buy the title outright nor any Season Passes or expansions.
It also certainly helps that Brawlhalla supports full cross-platform play between Steam, PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo Switch and even mobile versions with rollback netcode as well as all of the crossover characters / costumes to get people in the door including Street Fighter, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Adventure Time, Steven Universe, and Tomb Raider among others.
Those who do stick around and wish to go deeper are also rewarded with the largest eSports circuit in any fighting game, as 2021’s competitive season boasted a total prize pool of over $1 million.
We’re not going to suggest that other fighting game developers over at like Capcom and Bandai Namco need to start copying Brawlhalla across the board, but they might learn a thing or two by looking closely at what makes it so successful.
As for the arena fighters, these numbers go to show that there is indeed a market for them that can sustain for years with its wider appeal, but even then, they aren’t played as consistently as the top traditional fighters around right now.
Taking a look at those who didn’t manage to crack either list, The King of Fighters 2002 Unlimited Match is actually SNK’s best performing fighter on Steam right now with only an average of 153 players, so The King of Fighters 15 should be able to very easily take and keep that title after it releases in February.
Neither Marvel vs. Capcom game is currently very popular on PC, but Ultimate Marvel 3 is still handily more played despite Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite being newer and using rollback netcode.
One last thing that I found both a bit funny and sad looking through the data is that Dead or Alive Xtreme Venus Vacation is about 20 times more popular on Steam compared to Dead or Alive 6 with its month’s average at 2,136 players as opposed to DOA6’s 122.
It’d be fascinating to see how these statistics stand up next to those on the consoles now, which is likely never going to happen, but it’s easy to imagine there are similar patterns occurring over on the PlayStation and Xbox side of things too.
While fighting game scene on PC is healthy and growing, we’re also still nowhere near the real top dogs on the platform.
Even Brawlhalla’s comparatively wild monthly peak numbers wouldn’t even put it in the top 25 games on Steam right now. Tekken 7 would be 100th with its peak, so there’s a long way to go.
Being potentially in the top 100 is nothing to scoff at though considering how many games there are on Steam although I’m not sure how I feel about Tekken being beaten out by American Truck Simulator.
We’ll be keeping a very close eye on how the FGC grows from here and where it grows towards. This next generation of fighting games is already shaping up to be very different than any that came before.
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