A dark horse has emerged at the top of the Steam best-selling charts, and it’s none other than Digimon Story: Time Stranger. After selling out physical copies in Japan, the RPG has reached a peak concurrent player count of 84,458, per SteamDB, surpassing its predecessor by a whopping 28 times.
More impressively, the figure puts it ahead of other juggernauts in the genre, including every Persona and single-player Final Fantasy title to date. Square Enix’s most recent entries, Final Fantasy XVI and FFVII Rebirth, drew 27,508 and 40,564 concurrent players at their peak — though it should be noted that both were first released for the PS5 — while Atlus’ Persona 3 Reload and Persona 5 Royal hit 45,002 and 35,474 concurrent players, respectively. Tales of Arise, coming in with a peak player count of 60,274, was also outpaced.
Against its own, the previous Digimon Story instalment, Cyber Sleuth – Hacker’s Memory, peaked at 3,429 concurrent players, versus the all-time peak of 1,685 concurrent players for 2023’s Digimon World: Next Order, which is part of another series (both are PS Vita ports, to be fair). Digimon Survive was the former record holder for the highest concurrent peak in the franchise, attracting around 6,000 monster tamers at its time of launch in 2022.
As it stands, last year’s Metaphor ReFantazio is the closest that a recently released JRPG has come to matching the milestone, with an 85,961 all-time concurrent peak on Steam, followed by Granblue Fantasy: Relink at 114,054. While technically not purely JRPGs, similar titles by Western developers, such as Deltarune and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, are also on the list.
Developed by Media.Vision, Digimon Story: Time Stranger marks the seventh instalment in the long-running subseries that “explores the deep bond between humans and Digimon in an epic story that unravels the mystery of the world’s collapse.” The title is shaping up to be one of Bandai Namco’s biggest RPG launches in recent years, but the decision to exclude some of its DLC packs from the Ultimate Edition has drawn flak from fans.
Si Jia is a casual geek at heart – or as casual as someone with Sephiroth’s theme on her Spotify playlist can get. A fan of movies, games, and Japanese culture, Si Jia’s greatest weakness is the Steam Summer Sale. Or any Steam sale, really.
Kevin Low
