At least on PC
It’s been one week already since Bandai Namco released the massive Season 2 update for Tekken 8, and people can’t stop talking about it (for better or worse).
The game-overhauling patch has received a ton of complaints and criticisms to the point that Tekken’s Steam reviews have fallen to “Overwhelmingly Negative.”
And with that level of detractors for the game right now, you’d almost think that matchmaking would be a ghost town or at least decreased since the update.
But is that actually the case?
This got us curious about Tekken 8’s numbers, so we headed on over to Steam Charts to see how the game is performing on PC currently.
What we found doesn’t quite match the picture that players have been painting the past week.
Instead, we saw the highest peak for the game in over a year and overall higher numbers coming from the end of Season 1.
Upon the launch of Tekken 8 Season 2, the game reached a peak concurrent userbase of 16,091, which hasn’t been seen for the game since March last year.
So unsurprisingly, more than double the usual amount of players hopped online to try things out.
This is about what you’d expect out of a big season update for a major fighting game, but what about what happened after?
Well, Tekken was on average peaking in the 6,000s in the weeks leading up to the patch.
Numbers obviously have gone down since the highest point last week, however, it’s still generally beating out where the game was before.
Tekken almost crested 10,000 on April 5 and has generally been around or above those active users in the days prior.
Today is a little bit lower with a 24-hour peak of 7,464, but that still beats out the average set at the end of Season 1.
So more people (at least on PC) are playing Tekken 8 Season 2 than the last few months of the game.
That’s still not enough to come close to matching Street Fighter 6, which has an impressive 32,487 concurrent players over the past day, but it’s still more than enough to make Tekken 8 the second most popular fighting game on the platform currently unless you want to count Brawlhalla up there too.
It’ll be interesting to see if Tekken’s numbers remain fairly consistent in the weeks to come or if things will continue to drop lower than where they were prior.
Bandai Namco has acknowledged the player responses to Season 2 with a few messages, so there may be more coming to re-shake up the game some more too.
“Fighters, we are aware of the current community feedback regarding #TEKKEN8 Season 2. We are carefully reviewing the balance of the game; expect more information about these changes soon,” reads the post from the official Tekken account in part.
Overall, Tekken 8 is not in any danger of “dying” any time soon even with these unpopular changes, but we’ll have to wait and see just how many people stick around to play the game in its current state.
Source: Event Hubs
