It’s official: the Final Fantasy 16 PC launch is somehow even worse than Final Fantasy 15’s (at least according to Steam)

The somewhat-awaited launch of Final Fantasy 16 on PC is here, nearly 15 months after the game’s initial release on PS5. The PC version arrived on Tuesday, available for purchase on Steam and the Epic Games Store.

So far, the reception has been… fairly lukewarm, even compared to the already small blip its predecessor, Final Fantasy 15, achieved at its launch – at least looking at it through the Steam prism.

In its first few hours of release, Final Fantasy 16 peaked at 16,947 concurrent players on Steam (via SteamDB), which is a fairly low turnout for such a high profile game. That figure started out even lower than that, and grew over the course of several hours, before it plateaued. It may well grow today and over the weekend, but there’s only so much we can expect for such a slow start.

Compare this to Final Fantasy 15, the Windows Edition of the game (that’s what Square Enix calls it) peaked at a much higher 29,498 concurrent players on Steam when it released in March, 2018. Under 30,000 isn’t itself an achievement, but it’s almost double that of Final Fantasy 16’s.

The two titles are available in about the same number of countries, though Final Fantasy 15 does have a slight advantage there. It’s worth noting, of course, that Final Fantasy 16 is also available through the Epic Games Store, so some percentage of players won’t show up on Steam’s tally.

Final Fantasy 15 was released on PC before the Epic Games Store launched, so the audience wasn’t as scattered. Nevertheless, the writing was pretty much on the wall looking at Steam’s global top sellers, a list of 100 games that does not have Final Fantasy 16 anywhere on it.

This is all bound to disappoint publisher Square Enix, and it doesn’t bode very well for the eventual release of Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth. The company recently revealed its intent to abandon platform exclusives and focus on publishing its games on as many platforms as possible. Indeed, Final Fantasy 16’s PS5 sales were deemed already below expectations, so it’s not like the PC release would’ve made waves anyway.

Looking at user reviews, players appear to be happy with the port, at least, though maybe the audience isn’t big enough for those freaky mods the game’s producer warned against to exist.

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