Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is another masterpiece brought by our favourite death-simulator developers, From Software. With ninjas and crazy prosthetics, it’s bound to be popular despite immensely difficult compared to its predecessors.

And guess what? It has. Spiel Times has reported that the game has one of the biggest launches on the platform, clocking in 125,000 concurrent players on its release date. That makes it the highest launch players of any game on Steam in 2019.

The game sold over 100,000 copies on PC in the first 24 hours of release and hit a peak of 125,315 concurrent players. For comparison, Capcom’s Devil May Cry 5, an insanely fun action game and Steam’s second biggest launch this year, had only 88,894 concurrent players.

It’s also worthy to note that Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is the third most popular Japanese game on Steam. The first being Monster Hunter World with around 227,644 concurrent players at its peak after launch, and the next game on the list is another From Software game, Dark Souls III.

It’s quite surprising to see a single player game trumping many big names, especially those with multiplayer, such PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, Dota 2, and CS:GO. This shows that the gaming industry is going strong and I hope it can maintain this momentum.

On a related note, check out From Software’s past action games on our special feature.