Guilty Gear Strive beat Street Fighter V and Tekken 7’s concurrent Steam players on day one

Guilty Gear Strive has already reached a higher concurrent player count on Steam than the PC versions of Street Fighter V and Tekken 7 ever managed.

Arc System Works‘ fighting game was released today and the PC version, at the time of writing, has 26,193 concurrent players on Steam.

In their histories, Tekken 7 and Street Fighter V have only hit concurrent PC users of 18,766 and 13,807 respectively.

It’s also possible that, as the day progresses and the weekend arrives, Strive could eventually overtake Mortal Kombat 11, which reached a peak of 27,301 when it launched in April 2019.

It does have a long way to go, however, to surpass the all-time concurrent high of 44,234 reached by Dragon Ball FighterZ.

These numbers are unusual for a Guilty Gear game. Its predecessor Guilty Gear Xrd Revelator only hit an all-time concurrent peak of 1,614, and the previous highest ranking game in the series, Guilty Gear XX Accent Core Plus R, only managed 2,330, meaning Strive has outdone it more than ten times over.

Strive, the seventh main instalment in the popular Guilty Gear fighting game franchise, was set for release on PlayStation 4 and PC in late 2020.

The game was eventually delayed until early 2021, though, and then delayed again until June 11, with Arc System Works explaining that “every aspect” of development had been impacted by the coronavirus pandemic.

“In addition, we have decided to set up a schedule to further improve the quality of the game responding to everyone’s help and dieback from the recent closed beta test,” read a message from producer Takeshi Yamanaka.