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Update: Players keep pouring into Digimon Story: Time Stranger on Steam, and it's not just outdoing its own predecessors – now it's setting records versus some genuine JRPG icons. Persona? Final Fantasy? Nah, PC gamers just want the digital monsters.
Digimon Story: Time Stranger has reached a peak concurrent player count of 70,964, as SteamDB shows. How good is that? Well, it's a bigger number than what's been posted by any Persona or single-player Final Fantasy game that's preceded it.
Only two JRPGs have reached bigger concurrent player numbers: Metaphor: ReFantazio at 85,961 and Granblue Fantasy: Relink at 114,054. (Assuming you're serious about the 'J' in JRPG, anyway, as games by Western developers like Deltarune and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 are also up there.)
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Original story: Digimon Story: Time Stranger is doing monstrous numbers on Steam, proving that the children still yearn for a big-budget, pristine creature collector. (Don't let us down again, Pokemon Legends Z-A...)
The latest digital monsters game came out just yesterday and immediately shot to the top of Steam's best-sellers chart, listed by revenue, ahead of evergreen favorites like Helldivers 2 and upcoming mammoths like Battlefield 6.
Every other metric also paints a hopeful picture. Right now, Digimon Story: Time Stranger's peak concurrent player count on Steam sits at 54,446. For context, that's about 16 times more than the last Digimon Story's peak on the platform (which was a PS Vita port, to be fair), and 32 times more than the last game in the series, 2023's Digimon World: Next Order (also a PS Vita port).
The excellent Digimon Survive previously held the record for the highest concurrent peak, with approximately 6,000 monster tamers playing it simultaneously more than three years ago. Fair to say there's been a pretty big bump since 2022.
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Time Stranger isn't just making a nice load of cash, though. The JRPG currently enjoys a 'Very Positive' rating based on well over 500 user reviews on the platform.
"An improvement on Cyber Sleuth and Hacker's Memory," one fan writes. "Visually, gameplay, and of course the Digimon! And my favorite girl Minervamon is getting awesome representation!"
"It looks great, the music is great, lots of QoL updates from Cyber Sleuth to this in many many areas, and the story, while so far nothing to write home about, is at least fun and goofy," says another. "The closest thing I can compare this to from personal experience is Persona 3: Reload, many aspects of this so far feel very very inspired from that, and it makes the game so much better for it."
The negative reviews that do exist call out Time Stranger's 10 DLC packs, some of which aren't even included in the game's £105/$120 Ultimate Edition.
Kaan freelances for various websites including Rock Paper Shotgun, Eurogamer, and this one, Gamesradar. He particularly enjoys writing about spooky indies, throwback RPGs, and anything that's vaguely silly. Also has an English Literature and Film Studies degree that he'll soon forget.
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