The PC platform, and more specifically Steam, continues to grow in the fighting game community as the place to play the best competitive version in many cases and shows no signs of slowing down anytime soon.
With The King of Fighters 15 finally releasing earlier this week, Steam numbers are showing a healthy start for SNK’s newest title, but how does it compare to the rest of the series and other big fighting games on the market?
According to Steam Charts’ user numbers, KOF15 reached a launch peak of 8,205 active players at once on release night with the high point over the past day being 6,049 players.
That easily puts the new King of Fighters straight into the best launch SNK has seen on PC up to this point, considering their last record for peak players was apparently held by King of Fighters 14 at only 1,173 concurrent users.
This will hopefully be seen as a pretty big win for SNK with this much growth on just 1 platform if PlayStation and Xbox are showing anything similar to that jump.
When put directly next to the other major fighting games of the past generation, however, it seems that they are still playing backup fiddle to the likes of Capcom, Bandai Namco, NetherRealm Studios and Arc System Works in terms of wider / mass appeal.
KOF15’s current peak numbers fall well short of Dragon Ball FighterZ and Guilty Gear Strive’s heights of 44,234 and 30,939 concurrent Steam users respectively while also being behind Street Fighter 5, Tekken 7, Mortal Kombat 11 and even Soul Calibur 6.
Most of those are from multiple years ago though, so looking only at the present climate gives KOF15 a few more deserved achievements.
King of Fighters 15’s 24-hour peak of 6,049 players beats out all of the aforementioned titles with Tekken 7 coming the closest as of the time of writing at 5,630 players, which isn’t too surprising for a brand new fighter on the scene.
It is still nice though that KOF15 can enjoy the spotlight a bit as the current king on PC (unless you want to count in Brawlhalla’s bonkers 24,489 players over the past day).
SNK’s fighters have rarely managed to sell the millions that Street Fighter and Tekken put up, so these numbers probably aren’t surprising to those who’ve followed the FGC for years now.
The King of Fighters 15 is a great fighting game, you can read our review if you don’t believe us, but it is still lacking in the type of single-player content that makes NRS titles sell and isn’t so much presenting itself as an easy jumping in point to the series like Strive.
That doesn’t mean it needs those things to succeed though. KOF15 is unabashedly KOF, and fans of the series seem to be enjoying it a lot, which is most important and could help grow the scene over time like Tekken 7 did.
According to Steamspy’s owner estimates, between 50,000 and 100,000 players have purchased KOF15 on Steam in only 3 days, so that’s great to see too.
