Friday afternoon's reading of 33,630 concurrent players on Steam was higher than anything we caught on Thursday. That is the first time since the Sunday peak that a day has beaten the day before it. Two days ago we wrote that Zero Company had halved in a week and the weekday slide had not levelled off yet. It now looks like it is levelling off, and this is the number that says so.
The two days since
| Day (UTC) | Highest reading | Lowest reading |
|---|---|---|
| Wed Sep 2 | 40,119 | 18,018 |
| Thu Sep 3 | 35,061 | 17,395 |
| Fri Sep 4 | 33,630 | 16,753 |
Read the right-hand column first. The overnight floor, which we have argued is the honest measure of who is still playing, fell 28% on Tuesday, 14% on Wednesday, then 3.5% on Thursday and 3.7% on Friday. The slide is still a slide. It is just a much gentler one than the launch-week headlines will have you expect.
The afternoon highs tell the same story from the other side. Thursday's US afternoon high was 32,658. Friday's, taken almost the same hour, was 33,630. Thursday's top reading in the table above is 35,061 because it landed just after midnight UTC, which is Wednesday evening in the States, so the like-for-like comparison is the afternoon pair. Up 3%. Small, and the first plus sign in five days.
What it means against the rest of Star Wars
On Wednesday evening Zero Company had 3.3 players for every one player across the other fifteen Star Wars games we track combined. Friday at the same hour the ratio was 2.6 to one. Still nothing close to it, but the gap is narrowing, and not because Zero Company is losing people faster. The rest of the field grew: the other fifteen games added about 1,300 players between Wednesday and Friday afternoon, with The Old Republic, Empire at War and Jedi: Survivor carrying most of it.
What this weekend will tell us
Last weekend the game gained roughly 20% from Friday to Sunday and set its all-time high of 75,825 on Sunday evening. If the pattern holds even loosely, we would expect this Sunday to land somewhere in the 38,000 to 42,000 range. Anything above 45,000 would mean people are coming back after finishing, or new buyers arrived in numbers, and either is a better story than the first week's fall. Anything under 35,000 means the weekend lift is gone already and the floor is where the game will live from here.
We will have the answer on Monday. Until then, nothing in these numbers should change a buying decision: this is what a single-player campaign game looks like nine days after launch, and it is still the busiest Star Wars game on Steam by a wider margin than any other game in the franchise has managed since we started counting.
How we count
Steam's public concurrent-player figure, sampled every two hours since launch and stored in a CSV we publish with the site. Highs and lows in the table are the highest and lowest readings we caught on each UTC day, not true peaks: with a reading every two hours, the real high is almost always a little above ours. Twitch viewers and console players are not counted anywhere here.
