Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel Breaking Records With Over 240,000 Concurrent Players

gamerant.com:

While it's obvious that Yu-Gi-Oh! as a franchise enjoys lots of attention from across the world, it's still incredible to see it outpace its established competition to such an extent. Namely, Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel has managed to attract about twice as many concurrent players as its runner-up, Prismata, and almost four times as many as Valve's own Artifact Classic.

Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel has launched just a few days back, on January 19th, only to completely dominate the card game niche on Steam. With more than 240,000 concurrent players on PC alone, it has already reached the levels of immediate popularity that go far beyond anything a card game had previously managed on Valve's gaming platform.

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Drawing data from Steamcharts, which keeps track of all player base information on Steam, Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel reached its record number of concurrent players three days after its initial launch. The specific all-time peak was 241,038 players, which compares extremely favorably to games such as Artifact Classic and Shadowverse, with 60,740 and 23,929 concurrent players respectively. Curiously, the second-highest number of concurrent players for a card game was that of Prismata, a niche early access title which reached its historical peak of 121,154 players back in 2018, only to never reach it again.

None of the other popular TCG franchises have managed to get numbers that are even close to those of Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel. The previous version of Yu-Gi-Oh! on PC hovered around 20,000 concurrent players at best, while Magic: The Gathering games never seem to get much in the way of mainstream attention. GWENT, too, has never had more than 5,000 players playing the game at the same