As expected, Crimson Desert had a pretty big launch on Steam during its first weekend. But perhaps not quite as big as expected. Pearl Abyss’s noisy entrant into the higher echelons of AAA gaming hit a peak of 248,530 players online on Sunday, which is some way off the biggest launches of 2026 to date, or the biggest historically within its genre.
So far, the 2026 crown goes to indie deck-building roguelike Slay the Spire 2, a game made for a tiny fraction of Crimson Desert‘s budget, which peaked at an astonishing 574,638 players — more than double Crimson Desert‘s total — on its launch Sunday earlier in March. Slay the Spire 2 is showing impressive staying power, too, with a peak this past Sunday of 463,795 players. Day-to-day, it’s holding on to fourth place behind the perennial trio of Counter-Strike 2, PUBG, and Dota 2, and ahead of Crimson Desert, Apex Legends, and all the rest.
Crimson Desert is the third-biggest Steam launch of 2026 to date behind Slay the Spire 2 and Resident Evil Requiem, which peaked at 344,214 concurrent players on Saturday, Feb. 28.
Crimson Desert‘s peak player count is currently Steam’s 67th highest of all time. That’s no mean feat, but it’s a long way off single-player titans like Elden Ring (over 890,000 players at launch), Cyberpunk 2077 (over 1 million on day one), and Baldur’s Gate 3 (over 800,000 players on its launch weekend). Unfair comparisons, perhaps, but during its inflated hype cycle, this was the sort of company many observers expected Pearl Abyss’s game to be keeping.
On Friday, Pearl Abyss announced that Crimson Desert had sold 2 million copies in its first day. That’s a strong launch by most standards, although it seems investors had hoped for more. Pearl Abyss’s share price dropped 30% after reviews came in below 80 on Metacritic, and dipped a little further after launch, when player feedback largely matched the complaints raised by reviewers.
But things are already looking up. Crimson Desert‘s Steam review rating recovered from “mixed” to “mostly positive” over the weekend, and the developer has begun addressing complaints already, apologizing for the “unintentional” use of generative AI art in the game and patching in improvements to controls, difficulty, and item storage.
Now that Crimson Desert is on sale and in players’ hands, the story is similar to that told by the game’s reviews: It’s not the overwhelming triumph foretold in the game’s hype cycle, but it’s far from being a car-crash disaster, either. Now the hard work for Pearl Abyss begins; who knows, in a couple of years’ time, we might have another Cyberpunk 2077 or No Man’s Sky on our hands.
