This week saw EA bring a number of its games to Steam, releasing existing titles like The Sims 4 and Dead Space 3 for one of the PC platform’s largest marketplaces, and from the looks of it, none of these games are benefiting from the increased exposure quite like Titanfall 2.
It’s no secret that Respawn Entertainment’s sequel hasn’t seen the popularity most major first-person shooters have seen. Released in late October 2016, it had the unfortunate honor of launching right between two of that year’s biggest FPSs, EA’s own Battlefield 1 and Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare. It was a move many felt was EA effectively gutting the game's sales potential in order to avoid any competition with Battlefield 1.
In the years since, the game has tended to be played by only the most loyal and hardcore of players, but this week’s Steam release appears to have led to a large influx of newcomers. In fact, as of this writing, Titanfall 2 is currently the top-selling game on Steam, beating out perennial hits like The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim and hot new titles like Hardspace: Shipbreaker and Satisfactory.
Eurogamer also reports that the game has attracted nearly 7,000 players on Steam. That number may be pretty insignificant next to the concurrent user counts of the most popular Steam games, but it’s still enough to place Titanfall 2 among the 100 most-played games on the platform. Better yet, 7,000 players is still large enough to make Steam a viable platform for newcomers to try out the game’s multiplayer.
This is hardly the first time this has happened, though, as Titanfall 2 has seen occasional bursts of increased popularity throughout the years, like when the massive launch of series offshoot Apex Legends led to increased interest in Titanfall 2. Most recently, the game saw an explosion of new players on console when it was included in PlayStation Plus’ selection of free games for December 2019.
It may be a bummer for Titanfall fans that the game never really got its due, especially since the general consensus among those who have played it is that Titanfall 2 is one of the finest shooters of recent years, with rich and fluid multiplayer on top of one of the most memorable single-player campaigns in a shooter. If the Steam launch so far is any indication, though, there’s a fair chance plenty of new players will soon be trying it out for themselves.
Titanfall 2 is available for PC, PS4, and Xbox One.