SEGA has been eating good these past two weeks, with the launch of Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth followed by Persona 3 Reload on Steam. It instantly became a hit, amassing 43,801 peak players, beating FFVII Remake Intergrade’s 13,000 and Nier Automata‘s 23,000 all-time peak. The game received an average of 89 scores on Metacritic and OpenCritic, while it got an Overwhelmingly Positive response out of 2,861 Steam reviews, at the time of writing.
The company has yet to release official sales figures, but right now, at least 43,763 PC players are currently investigating the Dark Hour. And we’re not counting people who are playing on PC Game Pass. The peak concurrent Steam players keep rising and could easily pass 50,000 users in a few days.
Reload‘s success isn’t surprising in the very least as it is the first proper Atlus game to launch simultaneously on PC and consoles. Sure, Persona 5 Royal port launched on the same day on PC, Xbox, and Switch in 2022, but it debuted on PS4 two years earlier. The long-awaited Persona 4 Golden‘s Steam release was also ported from the long-forgotten PS Vita handheld. Meanwhile, Persona 5 Tactica is a turn-based tactics game spin-off and not part of the main RPG titles.
Thankfully, the simultaneous launch strategy has paid off, especially if we compare other Persona and Atlus games on Steam based on SteamDB’s data below.
| Persona Game | All-Time Peak / Launch Players |
|---|---|
| Persona 3 Reload | 43,801 players |
| Persona 5 Royal | 35,474 players |
| Persona 4 Golden | 29,984 players |
| Persona 5 Strikers | 8,730 players |
| Persona 4 Arena Ultimax | 7,099 players |
| Soul Hacker 2 | 5,692 players |
| Persona 5 Tactica | 4,344 players |
| Persona 3 Portable | 3,515 players |
| Etrian Odyssey HD | 3,283 players |
| Etrian Odyssey III HD | 1,577 players |
| Catherine Classic | 1,265 players |
| SMT III Nocturne HD Remaster | 1,906 players |
| Etrian Odyssey II HD | 360 players |
As mentioned above, Persona 3 Reload is also available on PC Game Pass, which means that more people can access it without paying full price. However, on the flip side, fans have wondered if the Game Pass release ended up affecting the game’s overall sales.
Regardless of the exact impact of PC Game Pass on Persona 3 Reload Steam sales, it’s clear that Atlus has made a smart move. Releasing it on multiple platforms at once not only increases the potential audience for Persona but also shows appreciation for PC fans. Fans who are starved of same-day, native port of the high-school-simulator-slash-mystery-RPG for years.
As a PC owner, here’s hoping that Atlus will continue this trend and simultaneously release future games like Shin Megami Tensei and Persona 6 on all platforms on day one. That would be a dream come true for many JRPG lovers around the world.
