And we don’t usually see that for fighting games
Typically when a new fighting game releases, most players tend to move on from the prequel or at least stop playing the old game, but that’s not what we’re seeing at the moment.
Mortal Kombat 11 actually appears to be outpacing the new Mortal Kombat 1 in terms of player count, at least on PC with Steam.
According to Steam Charts, both Mortal Kombat games have been fairly equal in terms of concurrent active players at any given time beginning about a week ago, but the older game more often than not has the edge (even if MK1 had the very slight edge in actives at the time of reporting).
Mortal Kombat 1 was winning pretty handily since it first launched last month with MK11 suddenly surging back to life starting October 21.
Over that time, MK11 has managed to cross 10,000 active players basically every evening, which is a pretty impressive feat when it was peaking around 3,500 daily a month ago.
The last time MK1 reached 10,000 concurrent users on Steam was all the way back on was October 8 according to the charts.
We can’t remember this really happening before in a major fighting game release, and after taking a look back through Mortal Kombat X and the Injustice games, it certainly hasn’t happened for other NetherRealm Studios titles either.
We don’t think this is due to a singular reason, but likely a handful of factors that have built to that point.
One of the biggest at the moment may likely be that MK11 is on sale for just $5 on Steam and Ultimate for a seriously low $9.
If you compare how much content (all characters, two story modes, every update) in Ultimate to what Mortal Kombat 1 currently offers at $70, it’d make sense that new people are looking for the most bang for their buck right now.
That can’t be the only thing, however.
We didn’t see that with Street Fighter (even though Street Fighter 5 is also $5 right now too), we didn’t see that with Guilty Gear and we didn’t see that with The King of Fighters when they all had their sequels release. Not by a long shot.
Mortal Kombat 1 has infamously had issues since launch with many of them only really impacting the PC playerbase like crashes that would then leave users with over a gigabyte of memory taken away from crash reports every time.
Quite a few of those bugs have been smoothed out at this point, but even the new update this week didn’t seem to make more people hop back on to MK1.
While we can’t see the console numbers, we don’t really suspect this same trend has taken place on PlayStation and Xbox though we can’t really be sure of that either.
What we do see, however, is a PC base that is perhaps not looking forward to playing second fiddle behind the main consoles once again for the lifespan of another NRS game.
PC players got the new MK1 update late once again, and the company still won’t confirm if cross-platform play is coming to Steam or not — though at this point it’s looking less and less likely.
It’s also a bit telling that MK1’s all-time peak of 26,576 concurrent players couldn’t quite match MK11’s 27,301 all-time record.
Meanwhile, the fighting game community on PC has continued to grow significantly more than where we were even back in 2019.
That’s not to say Mortal Kombat 1 is in mortal danger or anything.
It’s still putting up pretty good numbers as like the fourth-most played fighting game on Steam right now.
But being beaten out by your predecessor is almost unprecedented in this scene and does at least point to the concerns within such.
This MK11 resurgence may very well be just a temporary flash in the pan though when more people are going back to the old thing instead of supporting the new one, that’s not exactly great for a game company.
We’re extremely intrigued as to how everything will continue to develop for the PC Mortal Kombat community that found a sizable home with the last game.
Mortal Kombat 1 still has a lot of great stuff going for it, especially in the core gameplay, and we’re pretty sure Omni-Man’s release will help boost those numbers early next month too.