Overkill’s The Walking Dead, the developer’s take on the popular license in vein of their popular co-op shooter Payday, launched on PC a couple days back, but according to concurrent player statistics, it doesn’t seem like it’s been doing very well at launch. According to Steam’s statistics, the game has hit a concurrent player count peak of just over 12,000 players.
To be more precise, it hit a concurrent players peak of 12,161 players, while currently, at the time of writing, it stands at 11,383. That’s on the low side, to say the least, especially for a game that just launched. Several other games that have launched in recent weeks, such as Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Football Manager 2019, are well above it- in fact, even Football Manager 2018 is above it right now.
A number of much older games are also outperforming Overkill’s The Walking Dead significantly. The likes of Rust, Don’t Starve, Terraria, and Paladins all have higher concurrent player counts, while even Overkill’s very own Payday 2 is outperforming it, with a concurrent player count peak of 17,606 for the day. Currently, Overkill’s The Walking Dead is not even in the top 40 of the concurrent player charts on Steam.
Speaking of Payday 2, for comparison’s sake, and to give you an idea of how well Overkill’s own games have performed in the past, in the month that it launched, Payday 2 had an average concurrent player count of 16,650 players, while hitting a peak of 57,346 concurrent players. Keeping that in mind, it goes without saying that an Overkill game, especially one carrying a license as big as The Walking Dead, is expected to perform significantly better than it seems to be doing right now.
That said, there are other factors that should be considered as well. The marketing for the game has been a confused mess at best, and awareness about it and its release seem to have slipped under the radar for a large number of people, especially in a season that has been crowded by big-name releases such as Fallout, Call of Duty, Battlefield, Assassin’s Creed, and more. So it’s entirely possible that as time passes and word of mouth spreads, the game’s performance might improve.
In our review of Overkill’s The Walking Dead, we called it “a fun title that is bogged down by a combination of bugs, lack of sign-posting, and confusing design decisions.” Read our full review through here. The game will launch on PS4 and Xbox One in 2019, so hopefully, the most obvious issues holding it back will have been ironed out by then.
