In just 24 hours after it was released, it was reported that Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero had sold over 3 million copies. It had surpassed every other fighting game in terms of its peak player count on Steam, with the exception of MultiVersus.
While these signs were certainly promising at first, it would appear that Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero has lost much of its playerbase. A look at the SteamDB chart for Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero (via GWM) reveals that the number of players currently playing the game as of a few hours ago was recorded at 13,807. This is quite a far cry from its peak record of 122,554 players recorded 31 days ago when the game was initially released on October 11, 2024.
Naturally, it’s expected that a game’s playerbase will be most interested in a game when its first released. We’ve seen this time and time again, but this is reduction of 88.7% since then.
Reportedly, this drop in players is due to frustrations dealing with the game’s balance. There are even reports that players are cheating and rage quitting during online gameplay. Notably, a rage quit will result in the winning player receiving no points for their efforts.
Recently, the Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero developers issued a warning to those that were injecting mods into the Custom Battle mode. If caught, players utilizing mods in their Custom Battle scenarios would be banned.
More than likely, this warning will probably also extend to those that have been cheating in multiplayer matches. It will certainly be interesting to see if the players return once the cheating and balance issues are properly addressed.
Bandai Namco recently announced the international Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero eSports tournament. Alongside this announcement, it was also revealed that a new balance patch will also be dropped sometime in December 2024.
Though this may seem to paint a grim picture for Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero, its 24-hour peak of 16,073 is outperforming Tekken 8 and Dragon Ball FighterZ’s 24-hour peaks of 7,853 and 935 respectively.
However, Street Fighter 6’s 24-hour peak appears to mark it as the top fighting game right now as it had a 24-hour peak of 28,200. Still, as of the time of writing this, Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero currently has nearly twice the number of players (15,168) as Street Fighter 6 (7,708).
One month out, Street Fighter 6 dropped from 70,573 to about 39,834, Tekken 8 dropped from 49,977 to 23,371, and Dragon Ball FighterZ dropped from 44,303 to about 15,819. While Dragon: Ball Sparking Zero does currently hold advantages over the other fighting games, it appears to be losing players at a much faster rate.
