Tekken 8 has impressive PC launch with high player count numbers but was it enough to catch Street Fighter 6’s record?

PC continues to be the fastest growing player base in the fighting game community, and that trend shows no signs of slowing down any time soon from what we’ve been seeing.

Tekken 8 proved to be another apparent successful launch on Steam this past week with high player count numbers making it the most played fighting game on PC currently.

At the time of reporting, Tekken 8 has a 24-hour peak of 33,043 concurrent players according to Steam Charts’ data along with a similar average of 33,838 users at any given time.

If we go by those average numbers, then Tekken 8 has almost more players combined than the rest of the top 10 fighting games on Steam including Street Fighter 6 and Brawlhalla though it doesn’t quite edge out the combination of those two when looking at just the past day.

Even said average is nearly double of Tekken 7’s all-time peak count of 18,766 concurrent users all the way back in 2017.

And speaking of peaks, Tekken 8 held down a whopping 46,139 active users upon release, which puts it just ahead of Dragon Ball FighterZ’s highest number of 44,234 as well as Guilty Gear Strive, Brawlhalla, Mortal Kombat 1 and Mortal Kombat 11.

Street Fighter 6 managed to hold onto its record, however, for highest player count in a paid fighting game considering it hit 70,540 back in June of last year — and had basically held that top position moving forward until Tekken 8 came along.

The only other time we’ve seen higher numbers was for the launch of the MultiVersus open beta that reached a staggering 144,132 concurrent users in 2022 as a free-to-play title, so it’ll be interesting to see how the platform fighter performs when it presumably comes back this year.

Although the PC base for fighting games is growing, we can see by looking at our chart that things are still skewed at the very top considering we have three games above 15,000 while the rest are below 2,500.

Under Night In-Birth II Sys:Celes launched just before Tekken 8 and has only reached a peak of 2,165 players though it was probably also hurt by the Steam version releasing with some severe issues that weren’t present on other systems.

At least every game is at least averaging 1,000 or more, which is not something we could have said about the top 10 last month.

Interestingly, our readers also recently responded that a slight majority of them are playing Tekken 8 on PC over PlayStation 5 (and leagues ahead of Xbox).

Numbers are pretty much always going to be high in a big game’s first month or two, so it’s going to be most telling and interesting to see how Tekken 8 continues to perform moving forward throughout the year and beyond.

Given Tekken 7’s staying power, however, it’s probably not going anywhere any time soon.