Despite being Steam’s top-seller this week, Prey sure doesn’t look like it sold that many copies on PC

As far as the number of copies sold on PC, Prey is not off to a good start.

Prey launched worldwide on Steam, as well as PS4, and Xbox One, overnight. The game has been at the top of Steams’s best-selling list for a few days now, and remains that way today.

Yet despite this, sales data so far does not look very promising. According to SteamSpy, the game has between 15,000 and 21,000 owners on Steam.

If you head over to Steam’s own stats page for daily active users, it puts it around 8,000, which also happens to be its all-time peak. Needless to say, it’s nowhere near the top 25 games with active users on Steam.

This is staggering, and just to put it in perspective, let’s take a look at Dishonored 2‘s launch performance, another Arkane game. Dishonored 2 had over 22,000 active players on launch day, and that’s keeping in mind the very busy release month of November, 2016, and the fact the PC port wasn’t very good.

Comparing Prey with other new IPs like this year’s For Honor would be a bit unfair. Regardless, For Honor had a peak of over 45,000 players at launch on Steam.

It’s important to remember that although Steamspy doesn’t claim to have 100% accurate data, it’s methodology for generating the data is sound. In almost every case, the sales data on the site is very close to the actual numbers.

The weak sales for Prey on Steam not only represent poor performance on Steam, but it also reflects badly on every other online retailer that sells Steam keys. That’s because the data covers the number of owners, regardless of where the copy was acquired.

It’s hard to point out exactly the reason for this, but it likely has something to do with how relatively poorly-received the demo was. There’s also little buzz online for the game, and Bethesda’s new policy of “no early review code” certainly isn’t helping. Whichever way you look at it, these numbers are unheard of for a Bethesda game.

Steam reviews appear to be positive so far, though, so maybe things will snowball. There’s also the two other console versions, which could be doing much better than PC.

from VG247 http://ift.tt/2pNB7MK