A month after launch, Zero Company's Sunday peak on Steam is 7,524, down from 75,825 on its first Sunday: a 90 percent fall in four weeks. The rest of Star Wars on Steam has outdrawn it at every reading since September 17 and now leads two to one. There has been no patch since 1.1 on September 9, no DLC, no roadmap and no discount. And by every commercial measure we can find, it is a hit: an estimated million copies sold, August's top new release on Steam by revenue, Germany's best-selling game of the month and three Golden Joystick nominations. Both are true at once; the second decides whether you buy it.
The five Sundays
Sunday afternoon has been the game's busiest hour every week, so it is the number we have led with since launch. Here is the full set.
| Sunday | Steam peak | Week over week |
|---|---|---|
| Aug 30 (launch weekend) | 75,825 | |
| Sep 6 | 35,430 | -53% |
| Sep 13 | 20,115 | -43% |
| Sep 20 | 11,610* | -42% |
| Sep 27 | 7,524* | -35% |
Two honesty notes on that table. First, our tracker has a hole from the morning of Sunday, September 20 to the afternoon of Saturday, September 26, so the two starred figures come from SteamCharts' hourly readings of the same Steam count; where the two overlap they agree to within a few dozen players, and we mark every number that comes from there. Second, the third Sunday: we published 20,115 that afternoon, our stored readings for that UTC day top out at 19,526, and SteamCharts' hourly peak is 20,036. The spread is what two-hour sampling looks like against hourly, and we have kept the figure we printed.
The launch peak gets the same treatment. Our highest reading was 75,825 on Sunday, August 30; SteamDB, which samples every minute, has that weekend's peak at 77,889, 2.7 percent higher. Readings hours apart always land a little under the true peak: a few percent on a normal day, nine percent on Labor Day, a fifth on Tuesday, September 8, when the gap fell on the busiest hour. So we trust the shape of the curve and use SteamDB's 77,889 whenever the all-time peak is the point. On that figure the four-week fall is also 90 percent. Tonight at 9:39pm Central, Steam's live count read 4,997.
Week by week, the drop is slowing
Launch weeks run Thursday to Wednesday. The average of each week's daily peaks, with SteamCharts filling the days we missed:
| Week | Dates | Average daily peak | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Aug 27 to Sep 2 | 60,282 | |
| 2 | Sep 3 to Sep 9 | 30,492 | -49% |
| 3 | Sep 10 to Sep 16 | 15,461 | -49% |
| 4 | Sep 17 to Sep 23 | 9,114* | -41% |
| 5 | Sep 24 to Sep 27 (four days) | 6,698* | -27% |
Each week was roughly half the week before for three weeks running, and then the halving stopped: week four lost 41 percent, and the first four days of week five lost 27 percent. That is the first clear slowing since we thought we saw one on day nine and were wrong. The overnight floor has kept falling, though: SteamCharts' weekday lows this week ran from 2,476 to 3,414, the first time the game has been under 4,000 overnight.
Our forecast from week four, too high three weeks running before that, mostly landed this time, although only SteamCharts can say so. We called the fourth Sunday at 11,000 to 13,000 and said it would probably miss; it came in at 11,610. We said weekday highs of 6,000 to 8,000 (they ran 8,598 down to 5,719), a floor of 2,800 to 3,600 (2,476 on Thursday, a little lower) and a fifth Sunday of 7,000 to 9,000 (7,524). We also said a floor above 4,000 would mean the game had found its level. It has not found it yet.
The rest of Star Wars, two to one
At our last reading, Saturday at 3:43pm Central, Zero Company had 7,481 players and the other fifteen Star Wars games we track had 15,228 between them: The Old Republic 4,941, Empire at War 1,996, Jedi: Survivor 1,987, Battlefront II 1,760, Outlaws 1,400, and the rest. At the launch peak Zero Company had 4.6 players for every one across the rest of the franchise. The first crossing came at 6:50am Central on Tuesday, September 15, and the rest of Star Wars has led at every reading since Thursday the 17th. It did not grow into that lead: its afternoon peaks have sat between roughly 9,800 and 16,600 all month. Zero Company shrank to it, and then through it.
One patch in 31 days
Patch 1.1 arrived on September 9, day 14, with 62 changes: the crashes, the saves and the 100 percent miss. Nothing has followed it. EA's news hub lists one entry under patch notes, Steam's update feed has no developer post after September 9, and searches for a hotfix, a 1.1.1 or a 1.2 turn up only coverage of 1.1. Eighteen days of silence.
The context is the studio. Bit Reactor furloughed most of its staff about two weeks before launch, saying it hoped to bring them back if the game succeeded, and Kotaku's report on the sales estimate last week said only a skeleton crew was reportedly left for patches and player support. We can find no report that anyone has been reinstated. There is no roadmap and no content DLC (the only DLC on the store is the $9.99 Deluxe cosmetic upgrade); Bit Reactor said before launch it had no plans for DLC or New Game Plus.
For a CPU-limited tactics game, that matters more than it would for most. Patch 1.1 went after the general crashes and stutters, but the crashes on Intel 13th and 14th generation processors that EA lists as a known issue were not in it, and with no second patch in sight, the workaround in our crash-fix guide (a BIOS update, or Intel's tuning utility) is the fix to plan on. If you have one of those chips and no appetite for firmware, that is the one real reason to hold off.
Still a hit
The Steam curve is what a finished single-player campaign looks like a month out. The sales figures say the same thing from the other side.
- Reviews. 21,922 Steam reviews at 83 percent positive, Very Positive, up from 80 percent of about 14,000 on September 4; the 3,200 reviews added in the last sixteen days came in more positive than the first fortnight's. Simplified Chinese reviews sit at 60 percent, Mixed, mostly over localization.
- Sales. GameDiscoverCo's August chart has Zero Company at 642,000 Steam units and $28.21 million in the five days it was on sale, first among August's new releases by revenue. Alinea Analytics' estimate of a million copies by September 22 puts 69.9 percent of them on Steam. Both are analyst estimates; EA has published no figure. It topped Steam's global top sellers for launch week, debuted at No. 2 on the UK boxed chart, and was Germany's No. 1 game for August.
- Awards and scores. Metacritic 85 on PC (68 critics), 82 on PS5, 85 on Xbox; OpenCritic 85 from 115 reviews, 92 percent recommending. PlayStation players voted it Players' Choice for August. On Friday the Golden Joystick nominations put it up for PC Game of the Year, Still Playing, and Best Supporting Performer for Vic Michaelis as Runa Blask, with voting open until October 23.
Whether a million copies and $50 million gross is enough to bring Bit Reactor's team back is a question only EA can answer, and it has not.
Should you buy it now, or wait for the Autumn Sale?
It is $49.99 on Steam, the price it launched at, and EA has not discounted it once in a month, not even during its own Steam sale that ends September 28 with Jedi: Survivor at $10.49 and Battlefront II at $9.99. Steam's Autumn Sale opens October 1. A month-old game left at full price through its publisher's own sale is a game the publisher is not ready to cut.
Our advice splits three ways. If you have been waiting on the numbers, stop: this is a single-player campaign with no online mode, and 7,524 players or 75,825 make no difference to a mission. Our review has it at 9 out of 10 for 30 to 40 hours of campaign, and nothing in the last month changes that. If $49.99 is the sticking point, the Autumn Sale is a reasonable bet and nothing more; EA has said nothing, and we would not wait more than that one week on it. If you are on a 13th or 14th generation Intel chip, read the crash guide first, because the patch that fixes that for you may not be coming.
How we count
Our tracker reads Steam's public concurrent-player figure every two hours; highs and lows are the readings we caught on each UTC day, not true peaks. It was down from the morning of September 20 to the afternoon of September 26, and asterisked figures come from SteamCharts' hourly readings of the same Steam count, which began on September 5 and match ours where they overlap. A Friday, September 18 reading that came back as zero is left out. "Rest of Star Wars" is the other fifteen games we follow, from SWTOR to Squadrons (the full list is in the week-four piece). Steam only: PlayStation, Xbox and EA app players are in none of these numbers. Earlier weeks: week four, week three, week two and week one.
