The launch of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has been explosive. Despite launching onto Microsoft’s Game Pass service, the JRPG from French studio Sandfall Interactive made waves earlier this week after its launch with a stellar Metacritic score and crossing half a million sales in just one day. However, we’ve got a much bigger story today – Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has become Steam’s most concurrently played JRPG on Steam ever.
We drew this conclusion by looking at SteamDB’s all-time peak player count charts, and comparing the numbers across games tagged as a JRPG. We see some heavy hitters like Metaphor: ReFantazio with its peak 86,000 players and Final Fantasy XIV Online with a peak of 95,000 players – but Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 beats them all, hitting a peak of 121,000 players today. It does come below Monster Hunter World and Monster Hunter Rise, but these seem wrongfully tagged as JRPGs, as they aren’t really that genre. They’re action RPGs, as is justified by the fact that Monster Hunter Wilds isn’t included in the list, where the genre tag there is correct.
As such, if we’re looking at the games that play like traditional JRPGs and fit the genre, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is the highest of them all. It’s incredibly impressive that a game inspired by the Final Fantasy and Persona franchises managed to outperform them on Steam, and even more so with this being developer Sandfall Interactive’s first ever game release. Congratulations to their small development team, and we can’t wait to see what’s next.
Are you one of the over 100,000 players of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 in its first weekend on Steam? Let us know in the comments down below, and keep your eyes on GameLuster for more breaking gaming news and analysis!
