On Thursday we said the retention question would get answered at the weekend. Here is the weekend.
At 11:03 UTC on Saturday, our tracker counted 40,546 people playing Star Wars Zero Company on Steam. Across the twelve other Star Wars games it caught a reading for in that same sweep, the total was 8,578. Zero Company had 4.7 times the rest of the catalogue put together, and it did it at a low point in the daily cycle rather than a peak.
The snapshot
Steam concurrents, all taken in the same sweep at 11:03 UTC on August 29:
| Game | Steam players |
|---|---|
| Zero Company | 40,546 |
| The Old Republic | 3,003 |
| Empire at War | 1,149 |
| Jedi: Survivor | 1,128 |
| Battlefront II (2017) | 906 |
| Jedi: Fallen Order | 686 |
| Outlaws | 615 |
| LEGO Skywalker Saga | 493 |
| KOTOR II | 235 |
| KOTOR | 185 |
| Battlefront II (Classic, 2005) | 106 |
| Squadrons | 46 |
| Battlefront II (2015) | 26 |
That is 82.5% of every tracked Star Wars player on Steam sitting in one two-day-old game.
Is it holding?
Two readings roughly 24 hours apart, at a comparable hour of the day:
| Time (UTC) | Zero Company |
|---|---|
| Thu Aug 27, 20:28 | 68,966 |
| Fri Aug 28, 18:38 | 62,810 |
| Sat Aug 29, 02:48 | 58,429 |
| Sat Aug 29, 11:03 | 40,546 |
| Sat Aug 29, 16:41 | 65,890 |
| Sat Aug 29, 20:53 | 74,282 |
Thursday evening to Friday evening is a fall of about 9%. For a single-player game on its first full day, that is a soft landing. The usual shape for a story-driven release is a much steeper slide once the launch-night crowd finishes its first session, and it has not happened here.
What happened instead is the bottom row. At 20:53 UTC on Saturday, with the whole US awake and Europe still up, our sweep caught 74,282. That is above Thursday's launch-evening reading. Two days in, the biggest number we have measured for this game is not from launch night. It is from Saturday.
The 40,546 in the headline snapshot is the other end of the same daily swing: 11:03 UTC is four in the morning on the US west coast, with only Europe's afternoon holding the number up. Steam concurrents breathe this hard every day, and reading a trough as a trend is the most common way people get these charts wrong. The claim in the title survives both ends of the swing: in the 20:53 sweep the other twelve games totalled 15,076, so Zero Company was still 4.9 times the rest of the catalogue at its own busiest hour.
Two things to hold this loosely by
These are spot readings, not daily peaks. Our tracker samples a handful of times a day, so the true Friday high sits somewhere above 62,810, and even Saturday's 74,282 is whatever the curve was doing at 20:53, not necessarily its top.
Steam is a slice. None of this counts PS5 or Xbox, where a Star Wars tactics game with a Clone Wars hook may well do better than it does on PC. Every figure here is one platform.
What actually settles it
Next weekend. A second Saturday still holding five figures would mean people are playing the campaign rather than sampling it. Bit Reactor puts the main story at 30 to 40 hours, so a second weekend is roughly where the first wave of players should still be mid-campaign rather than done. We will pull the same sweep and run it side by side.
The details
- All figures are our own Steam readings, collected by the tracker behind our player-count coverage. Every number in the snapshot table comes from a single sweep, so they are directly comparable to each other.
- Launch-day context and the all-time franchise leaderboard are in Thursday's piece.
- Galaxy of Heroes is in our tracker but has no Steam concurrent figure, so it is absent from the table rather than at zero.
- Still working through the campaign ourselves. The review lands when it is honest, and the starter guide is up now if you are starting this weekend.
