Warhammer 3 is the second most popular Total War game on Steam, ever

pcgamesn.com:

It’s only been out a few days but Total War: Warhammer 3 has the second-highest concurrent player count peak on Steam in the entire Total War RTS game series – despite the game being subject to review bombing and facing opposition from the “free” PC Game Pass release.

Over four years after the release of Total War: Warhammer 2, which is still one of the best strategy games on PC, Warhammer 3 is finally here to conclude the trilogy of Total War fantasy games. It’s an unusual release, certainly, as it’s the first time a Total War game has launched on Steam alongside a PC Game Pass release – which, for anyone subscribed to the service, effectively means they get the game for free.

Nevertheless, according to SteamDB Total War: Warhammer 3 has still done incredibly well on Steam, racking up a peak concurrent player count of 166,754 on its first day – nearly twice as many as Total War: Warhammer 2, and the second-highest in the series after 2019’s Total War: Three Kingdoms with a huge 192,298 record.

Aside from the Game Pass release, Total War: Warhammer 3 has also had to contend with being review-bombed – which analyst Daniel Ahmad puts down to Chinese players being upset with how the game was promoted in China. Something similar happened to Total War: Three Kingdoms when developer Creative Assembly announced it was ending support.

Total War: Warhammer III is out on Steam today and is being received well by most players.

But when you look at Chinese language reviews, 72% of them are negative. This also extends to Warhammer II, which saw negative reviews in the last few days.

Let's explore why