Mortal Kombat 11’s Launch Had 3 Times More Players Than 2015’s MKX on Steam

After failing to rank in Steam’s top 50 most played games back in 2015 with Mortal Kombat X, the iconic fighting game franchise has returned to its former glory with this year’s Mortal Kombat 11 launching at #10 on Steam.

Last Tuesday, Mortal Kombat 11 peaked with 35k concurrent players – a number almost three times higher than MKX’s peak of 14k players during its launch four years ago on Steam.

That number crushed NetherRealm’s 2017 superhero fighting game flop on Steam, Injustice 2. The DC Universe fighter peaked with only 1.8k concurrent players during its launch – which was only half of Marvel vs. Capcom Infinite’s disastrous launch peak of 3.5k players that same year.

MK11’s big comeback fell short of topping Dragon Ball FighterZ’s record-setting peak of 44k concurrent players last year on Steam, but the latest installment in the series easily surpassed other recent popular fighting games such as Tekken 7 (18k players), Soulcalibur VI (14k players), and Street Fighter V (14k players).

Unfortunately, while more gamers than ever are now playing Mortal Kombat on PC, not all are happy with the port from NetherRealm studios. After its first week, MK11 currently sits at a “Mixed” review score from users who are experiencing numerous technical issues and frustration over the game’s expensive microtransactions.

And their disappointment after purchasing the $60+ version of MK11 on Steam is rightfully so. The PC version didn’t launch with the same Day 1 patch that was made available to console players. And it took NetherRealm a whole week before releasing an update on PC (which many are still saying doesn’t help resolve issues for them or has even made things worse).

With a much larger player base on PC than their previous games, NetherRealm seems to now doing what they can to try and remedy the current state of the game. WB Games has made headlines in the past for having games with terrible performance issues on PC (Batman: Arkham Knight); hopefully, as the number of players on PC continues to grow, publishers like WB will start to give more attention to their PC launches.