The top 15 fighting games at the end of 2024 on PC with one very clear leader of the pack

Every year it seems more and more fighting game players are switching from console to PC with the added benefits of customizability and typically lower input lag, making it a continually growing ecosystem for the genre.

As we rapidly approach the end of 2024 now, we’ve seen some big new fighting games release this year, others continuing their hot streak and a few more unfortunately starting to dip in player retention.

To close out this eventful year in fighters, it’s time to take a look at which titles are performing the best and keeping their bases coming back for more.

We’re using the very helpful data of SteamCharts to determine our rankings where we can see how many players are on at any given time and what the peak ratings are like.

While data points usually fall in line with each other for a particular game, the 30-day average player count is what we’re going to be basing this top 15 on.

And judging by any current metric, there’s only one clear leader of the bunch.

Street Fighter 6 is still managing to pull an average of almost 14,000 players at any given time on Steam, which I don’t think we’ve seen any fighter really do consistently at that level over a year after launch outside of maybe Brawlhalla.

Although there was a balance update at the start of the month, Capcom’s flagship fighter is managing to pull these numbers in the middle of a substantial content drought between Terry and Mai’s releases — so people are still showing up day after day whether or not there’s anything new to do.

Those are pretty strong signs that SF6 as a whole is in a pretty healthy spot, even if many in the competitive community aren’t exactly happy with where the game is at currently.

You have to go down to the free-to-play platform fighter Brawlhalla to find the next closest title for performance on PC at just under a 10,000 average this month — so it is really impressive to see that game still pulling those numbers after seven years.

Tekken 8’s bronze medal placement is also a pretty strong feat, and with Clive Rosfield’s launch in December, the game’s average has increased 13% though it’s peak this month couldn’t match SF6’s average at 11,669.

There’s quite a major drop off after the top three, and that only becomes more severe the lower down the list you go.

Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero previously set the new record for a premium fighter on PC reaching 120,000 concurrent players at launch, but that average is now down to just over 3,400 a few months later.

That’s still a more than respectable number, however, especially for an arena fighter on PC, which typically don’t have a history of doing very much at all.

And things get really interesting when we reach the number five spot since we have Mortal Kombat 11 now beating out its successor Mortal Kombat 1 in both monthly and daily numbers.

Even with the big discounts going on currently in the Steam Winter Sale and the Khaos Reigns launch a few months back, MK1 still cannot build up traction the way its predecessor did — and we’re instead seeing something of the reverse with more people going back to the “old” game.

This very rarely happens in the fighting game space, and though this is only accounting for the PC base, it doesn’t exactly bode well for MK1’s future prospects.

And despite the growth we’ve seen in this part of the community, it seems we’re still struggling to support more than like eight or nine games to get them over a 1,000-player average.

Heck, we don’t even have 10 above 500 right now.

When looking back at the PC rankings from the start of 2024, most games’ numbers are actually down from where they were almost exactly one year ago besides Street Fighter 6 unless we count Tekken 8, Rivals of Aether 2 and Sparking Zero taking over for the previous games.

This could be due to many factors, but a big one is probably a lack of major DLC releases and updates at the end of the year here to bring more people back in.

The monthly averages don’t obviously tell the whole story either, as we have a few honorable mentions from December too.

Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite & Beyond’s launch saw the player count jump over 2,000% with a peak over 1,200 for the first time since the month after the game came out in 2017.

Virtua Fighter 5 R.E.V.O. also ran its open beta earlier this month, which reached a peak of around 2,600 users during the short period of time it was available.

So while things seem to be growing overall for fighting game players on PC, this is only having a true tangible benefit for the titles that are / were already the biggest around.

That’s technically bound to happen in any genre really, but it still goes to show that outside of our top three or top five that many fighters remain fairly niche.

So it’ll be very interesting to see how things continue to shake out in 2025 with more content, updates and new games on the way.