Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance has caught a second wind thanks to widespread memes and a surge in Twitch support, breaking out of years of modest activity and surging to player counts not seen since its launch some eight years ago.
Play Track notes a 1,000% rise in concurrent players since April 2021 according to the average monthly Revengeance players, and we can view the game's climb in real-time on PC – as ever, a central petri dish for gaming trends like these – thanks to Steam Charts.
Revengeance averaged just over 1,900 players when it launched on Steam in January 2014, and after a steep falloff – it is a short, single-player game after all – it leveled out around 100 to 200 concurrents. There were a few small peaks over the years, likely due to sales or other promotions, but nothing like the growth the game is seeing today.
The wave didn't really hit Steam until December 2021, which is also around the time the Revengeance memes started to pick up. Jetstream Sam is an all-timer, and who doesn't love the senator citing his sources. Some of the game's most-viewed YouTube videos were also uploaded in the past five months, with VODs and highlights from several high-profile Twitch streamers among them.
Since December, Revengeance put on roughly 300 average Steam concurrents a month until a small dip in March 2022, and it's now climbed to 1,200 average players as of the last 30 days. Compared to its previous, years-long average of 150 to 200 concurrents, the game is up well over 500% on PC alone.
The perfect storm of viral memes got it here, but the newfound popularity of Revengeance should also be attributed to the simple fact that the game still kicks ass after all these years. Nobody does character action like Platinum Games – with the arguable exception of Capcom – and the Bayonetta studio's spin on Metal Gear is equal parts absurd and enthralling. With its exhilarating combat and utterly out-of-pocket dialogue seemingly designed to generate memes, it's a wonder it took the internet this long to latch onto Revengeance.
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