Zero Company's third Sunday peaked at 20,115 concurrent players on Steam, 43 percent below last Sunday's 35,430 and about a quarter of the 77,889 it hit on launch weekend. The first patch went out on Wednesday and brought nobody back: the two days after it were the two lowest of the week. A week ago we projected a floor between 14,000 and 17,000 and afternoon highs between 28,000 and 32,000. The actual floor was under 8,000 and no day got past 21,500. That is a miss on both ends, and the reason is the same one as last time: we kept treating the previous week as the pattern.
The week, reading by reading
| Day (UTC) | Highest reading | Lowest reading |
|---|---|---|
| Mon Sep 7 (Labor Day) | 31,753 | 15,242 |
| Tue Sep 8 | 21,497 | 9,824 |
| Wed Sep 9 (patch 1.1) | 19,559 | 9,220 |
| Thu Sep 10 | 16,538 | 8,354 |
| Fri Sep 11 | 16,712 | 7,528 |
| Sat Sep 12 | 19,323 | 10,105 |
| Sun Sep 13 | 19,526 | 10,338 |
Read down the middle column. Tuesday, the first normal weekday after the holiday, lost a third of Monday's high in one day. Wednesday's patch, which fixed the saves, the crashes and the 100 percent miss and touched none of the balance, is the day the number kept falling. Thursday and Friday were the two quietest days since launch. The weekend lifted it, as weekends do, by about 17 percent over Friday, which is the first time the weekend lift has grown rather than shrunk. It grew because the weekday base fell faster than the weekend did.
The floor is still the number we trust most, and it is the one that moved. It sat between 15,000 and 20,000 for the whole of week two. This week it went 9,824, 9,220, 8,354, 7,528, then back over 10,000 for the weekend. The people playing at five in the morning Central are the ones who have not finished, and there are fewer of them every day, because a 30 to 40 hour campaign that launched on August 27 is now seventeen days old. Bit Reactor said before launch, in the Steam round-up of its July Discord Q&A, that there were no plans for DLC or New Game Plus "right now," and nothing has been announced since, so nothing is scheduled to give finished players a reason to come back.
The patch did not move it
We said last week that the patch spike, if there was one, would be the thing to watch, because it would show how many finished players were waiting for a reason to reinstall. The answer is none that we can see. Wednesday's high was lower than Tuesday's, Thursday's was lower than Wednesday's, and the overnight floor fell through the patch as if it had not happened. That fits what the patch was: 62 fixes and no new content. A player who had finished the campaign had nothing to come back to, and a player who had left over a bug was not reading patch notes. The one group it served was people still playing, and the numbers say it served them without adding to them.
Against the rest of Star Wars
This is the line that moved most. On launch weekend Zero Company had three players for every one across the other fifteen Star Wars games we track. Last Sunday evening it was 2.2 to one. At two in the afternoon Central today it was 1.2 to one: 19,526 players in Zero Company against 15,971 in the rest of the catalog, led by The Old Republic at about 5,900, Empire at War at 2,300 and Jedi: Survivor at 1,800.
The rest of the field is flat. Those three games were at 6,100, 2,200 and 1,900 at the same point last Sunday. Zero Company is not being overtaken by anything; it is descending toward a catalog that does not move, and at this rate the two lines cross in about a week. When they do, the headline that Zero Company had more Steam players than the rest of Star Wars combined will have held for about three weeks. That is still the strongest three weeks any Star Wars game has had on Steam since 2022.
Sellers chart, live
Steam's weekly top-sellers list for this week does not publish until Tuesday. Its live chart, ranked by revenue right now, has Zero Company at 24th this afternoon, behind Wardogs, Borderlands 4 and Space Marine 2 and just ahead of Helldivers 2. It was first for launch week and eighth last week. On Steam's most-played list it sat 94th at lunchtime and 83rd this evening. For a single-player tactics game with no online mode, seventeen days in, neither number is a scandal. Both are the reason a studio that furloughed most of its staff before launch needed launch week to carry the year.
What we got wrong, and what we would say now
Last week's miss was assuming week two would be a smaller week one. This week's miss was assuming week three would be a flatter week two. Both times the decline was steeper than the shape of the previous week suggested, and both times the floor told the truth earlier than the peak did. So the number we will forecast from now is the floor.
Our projection for the week ahead: an overnight floor between 6,000 and 8,000, weekday highs between 12,000 and 15,000, and a fourth Sunday between 14,000 and 17,000. If the floor holds above 8,000 through Thursday, we were too gloomy and the game has found its audience. If Thursday's floor is under 6,000, it has not, and the next thing worth watching is whether EA discounts it for the autumn sale.
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; Sunday's peak is from Steam's own most-played chart. Twitch, PlayStation and Xbox players are not counted anywhere here.
