Doom Eternal’s Launch Peaked with 100k Players on Steam

On Friday, Doom Eternal launched with an impressive peak of 105k concurrent players on Steam.

With three times more players, Bethesda’s latest take on the Doom series slayed their successful soft reboot from a few years ago — which peaked at 32k players when it launched back in May 2016.

The previous Doom game’s rave reviews combined with so many recent triple-A games being delayed this year all helped Bethesda’s demonic sequel drop into Steam’s current Top 10 most played games over the weekend.

But the biggest factor that can be attributed to Doom’s recent success has been the real life “Hell on Earth” pandemic caused by the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19), which has resulted in quarantines forcing gamers all across the world to stay at home.

The terrible situation caused by the virus has been hurting far more than just the gaming industry over the past month; however, the timing of Doom Eternal‘s digital launch couldn’t have been better for Bethesda, who have been struggling the past couple years with their new game releases.

Despite being one of the most visually impressive virtual reality games on the market, 2018’s Doom VFR peaked with only 277 players and made a strong case that VR is in trouble.

Bethesda’s decision to release the digital version of Rage 2 exclusively on their own launcher resulted in the game peaking with only 13.6k players when it finally came to Steam in May 2019. And Wolfenstein: Youngblood did even worse with a peak of 6.5k players later that year.

At the time of Doom Eternal’s reveal, it was uncertain if the game was going to come to Steam… or if Bethesda would keep it exclusive to their own launcher. Based on the current player counts,  it’s clear that launching on Steam was the right business decision; and the success of the sequel should hopefully keep more of Bethesda’s upcoming games on Steam in the future.