Hazelight’s follow-up to It Takes Two has hit file highs for the studio, as the quantity of Chinese-speaking gamers rockets on Steam.
It Takes Two turned a breakout hit for Hazelight Studios with virtually 23 million copies offered and several other Game Of The Year awards, and it looks as if the developer has one other winner on its palms with its successor Split Fiction.
Following its launch on Thursday, the co-op motion recreation has already hit a concurrent participant peak of 197,434 on Steam. That’s virtually triple the dimensions of It Takes Two’s peak on the platform (71,039) and an unimaginable leap forward of the studio’s first recreation, A Way Out (8,582).
At the time of writing, Split Fiction is the eighth most performed recreation on Steam, forward of GTA 5 and Apex Legends, and simply behind Marvel Rivals. The recreation’s participant numbers will seemingly solely improve over the weekend, and a key motive for its success could be all the way down to China.
Hazelight Studios founder Josef Fares has beforehand stated half of It Takes Two’s 23 million gross sales had been from China and a brand new Steam Hardware and Software Survey has revealed a major uptick in Chinese-speaking customers on the platform over the previous month.
According to the survey, February 2025 noticed a 20.88% improve in Simplified Chinese-speaking customers on Steam, with the group making up 50.06% of all the userbase. English is second with 23.79% (down 10.18%), whereas Russian is third with 6.76% (down 2.86%).
It’s unclear what has triggered this surge over the previous month. As reported by Automaton, the Chinese New Year holidays normally trigger a spike in Chinese-speaking gamers, however this surge in February final 12 months was a lot smaller at 7.26%.
The solely different discernible trigger is the beta for Chinese-developed recreation Mecha Break, which hit over 300,000 concurrent gamers shortly after it launched on February 23. Marvel Rivals, developed by China’s NetEase video games, additionally continues to be in style, hitting a 242,904 concurrent participant peak on Steam prior to now 24 hours.
Monster Hunter Wilds might have boosted these numbers too, by means of its beta earlier within the month, earlier than its full launch on February 28. Capcom’s juggernaut is at the moment the second most performed recreation on Steam, with a 24 hour peak of 961,406.
Simplified Chinese has been the most important language on Steam a number of occasions prior to now, with studies stemming again to 2018 and 2020, so it isn’t a brand new phenomena. It’s regularly been close with English too through the years, and contemplating China has an enormous inhabitants of over 1.4 billion, that isn’t completely stunning.
The large change right here could be the video games trade in China itself. While cell video games like Honor Of Kings and PUBG Mobile have been in style within the nation for years, final 12 months’s Black Myth: Wukong marked a major sea change as a AAA Chinese-developed single-player title throughout PlayStation 5 and PC, and it turned an enormous success.
As famous in our interview with Mecha Break producer Kris Kwok, it appears studios in China are turning in direction of consoles and PC as a result of the cell market has hit a ‘bottleneck’, with the success of Black Myth: Wukong proving these sort of video games generally is a large success.
It appears China typically is approving extra video games too. According to the South China Morning Post, China accepted 1,416 online game licences in 2024, the very best since 2019. This is break up between 1,306 home video games and 110 international titles.
While it stays to be seen if the video games trade in China will proceed to develop and develop, it appears inevitable that it’ll start to have an more and more massive affect on the plans of Western and Japanese publishers sooner or later.
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