Zero Company's second Sunday peaked at 35,430 concurrent players on Steam, and on Friday we told you to expect 38,000 to 42,000. We were wrong by about ten percent, in the direction that matters. The weekend lift that took the game to its all-time high a week earlier was 20 percent from Friday to Sunday; this weekend it was 5 percent, and Labor Day Monday, a holiday for most of the game's biggest market, did not lift it at all.
The weekend, reading by reading
| Day (UTC) | Highest reading | Lowest reading |
|---|---|---|
| Fri Sep 4 | 33,630 | 16,753 |
| Sat Sep 5 | 36,513 | 19,637 |
| Sun Sep 6 | 35,430 | 19,228 |
| Mon Sep 7 (Labor Day) | 31,753 | 15,242 |
Saturday, not Sunday, was the busier day this time, by a little over a thousand players. Sunday's 35,430 landed just above the line we drew on Friday: we said anything under 35,000 would mean the weekend lift was gone and the floor was where the game would live. It cleared that line by 430 players. Call it what it is. The launch-weekend pattern is over, and what is left is a game with a stable audience that plays a bit more on Saturdays.
The floor is the number we trust most, because nobody is online at 5am Central except the people who really are still playing. It fell from 41,349 on the first Sunday to 19,228 on the second. Then Labor Day took it to 15,242, the lowest reading since launch. A holiday should have lifted the overnight number, not dropped it, and the most likely reading is that the people who bought at launch have finished a 30 to 40 hour campaign and there is no post-game to keep them.
Against the rest of Star Wars
Two weeks ago Zero Company had more than three players for every one across the other fifteen Star Wars games we track. On Sunday evening the ratio was 2.2 to one. On Labor Day it dipped to 1.9 at the low point of the day, the first time it has been under two since we started counting.
Zero Company is not the reason. The rest of the field grew: the other fifteen games' combined Sunday-evening count went from 16,558 on launch Sunday to 16,035 this Sunday, flat, while their overnight floor came up. The Old Republic, Empire at War and Jedi: Survivor between them add more players on a weekend than Zero Company loses in a weekday, so the gap closes from both directions.
First to eighth on the sellers chart
Steam's own global top-sellers list, published this morning, has Zero Company at eighth for the week of September 1 to 8. It was first the week before. Ahead of it now: The Blood of Dawnwalker, Onimusha: Way of the Sword, Wardogs, Bodycam, How to Fish, Halloween: The Game and NBA 2K27. That is what week two looks like for any single-player game with no live component. It is also a reminder of how narrow the launch window is for a studio that furloughed most of its staff on a bet that the launch would pay for their return.
What we got wrong, and what we would say now
Our Friday number assumed the second weekend would look like a smaller version of the first. It did not; it looked like the weekdays with a Saturday bump. The mistake was treating launch weekend as a pattern when it was an event. We will keep publishing forecasts, because a number you can check is worth more than one you cannot, and we will keep saying when they miss.
The honest projection for this week is a floor between 14,000 and 17,000 and afternoon highs between 28,000 and 32,000, unless the patch Bit Reactor promised for this week lands and brings people back to see what changed. If it does, that spike is the next thing to watch, because it will show how many finished players are waiting for a reason to reinstall.
How we count
Steam's public concurrent-player figure, sampled every two hours since launch and published with the site. Highs and lows are the highest and lowest readings we caught on each UTC day, not true peaks. Twitch, PlayStation and Xbox players are not counted anywhere here.
