Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth Steam Launch Is Franchise's Biggest

gamerant.com:

The release of Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth has made it one of Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio's biggest launches to date, surpassing the last peak record of concurrent players on the Steam platform. Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio's Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth is the eighth mainline game in the long-running franchise, featuring the same turn-based RPG combat and open-world exploration as its predecessor, Yakuza: Like a Dragon.

This game was one of the most highly anticipated games of January 2024, with fans being excited about seeing Ichiban Kasuga and Kazuma Kiryu teaming up together and sharing the spotlight as the dual protagonists. The fans' hype for Infinite Wealth was maintained by the release of Like a Dragon Gaiden, as it would help to set up some of the plot threads for the eighth entry and become one of the best launches for the franchise on Steam in the process. While Gaiden was a success, Infinite Wealth's release smashed through the franchise's previous concurrent Steam player record by a wide margin.

SteamDB is a database that provides statistics and other information about the games sold on Valve's platform, such as the number of players concurrently playing at one time. According to SteamDB, Infinite Wealth managed to hit over 34,000 concurrent players a few hours after its release. This makes it one of the best Like a Dragon games to launch on the platform. This high number is likely due to Infinite Wealth having a global multiplatform launch, as opposed to games like Yakuza 0 or Judgment, which were games ported onto the Steam platform a few years after their initial launches on the PlayStation.

In comparison, the last peak record of concurrent players was set by Like a Dragon Gaiden, which had a peak of nearly 14,000 players around launch, making it a difference of a little over 20,000 concurrent players between the two releases. This number also surpassed the last mainline game, Yakuza: Like a Dragon, which had a peak concurrent count of 9,535 players. As of this