It’s great that so many PlayStation games have come to PC in the last few years, letting me stack a heap of extra big-budget videogame junk food on my pile of shame. Welcome to the backlog, Horizon Zero Dawn. These games haven’t always set the Steam top sellers list on fire, however, sometimes thanks to a marketing budget you’d have to squint to see. How many people even knew Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 came out on PC at the end of January? No wonder it only managed a peak player count of 28,189.
Meanwhile, the newly released Stellar Blade is currently number one on the global top sellers list and hit a peak of 183,380 concurrent players. As far as PS5 ports go, that puts it behind only Helldivers 2, which made it to 458,709 players at release. In the number three spot? Ghost of Tsushima Director’s Cut, with 77,154 concurrents.
For the sake of completeness, here’s a bunch of other PlayStation games Stellar Blade is doing better than on Steam: God of War (73,529), Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered (66,436), and The Last of Us Part 1 (36,496). In the case of the last one especially, Stellar Blade has the advantage of being a much better port. You’ll still want a controller because it’s that kind of game, but testing out the demo I found it ran smoothly and looked great, with no slowdown even when things were exploding all around me.
If you don’t know much about it, Stellar Blade is the kind of third-person hack-and-slash where perfectly timed parries and dodges are essential, with explorable open sections between the on-rails bits, and a plot that’s like every sci-fi anime you’ve ever seen thrown in a blender until it’s reduced to the purest Trope Juice. It’s basically Nier Automata for dummies, with even more fanservice.
While Stellar Blade comes with an impressive list of PC-specific features, like ultrawide resolutions, DLSS 4 and FSR 3 support, unlocked framerates and so on, there’s another reason the PC version might appeal that won’t get listed on the Steam page: mods. Stellar Blade’s protagonist Eve already boobs her way breastily through the game, but modders have wasted no time adding nudity, a variety of saucy outfits, pornographic backgrounds for the menu screen, and more. Nexus Mods already has dozens of adult mods and the game’s brand new.
There’s certainly overlap in the Venn diagram of “horny weebs” and “people who want a sequel to Nier Automata already”, but Stellar Blade does seem to have hit big with both groups of players. There are plenty of user reviews praising its optimization, combat, and exploration, as well as ones that are shamelessly thirsty. I quote: “The camera angles? Designed by the devil himself. Someone on that dev team was NOT okay.”
In both the user reviews and comments on Nexus Mods, there are an unusually high number of messages in Chinese, which provides the final piece in the “why is this fairly mid action game so popular” puzzle. Good thing Stellar Blade’s developers pushed back against region-locking.
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