Doom Eternal has launched strong on Steam.
Id Software’s fast-paced FPS saw over 100,000 concurrent players on Steam. At the time of publication, 75,869 people were playing at the same time on Valve’s platform.
As video game analyst Daniel Ahmad pointed out on Twitter, Doom Eternal is trending much higher than its predecessor, 2016’s Doom. In fact, Doom Eternal’s launch day Steam concurrent player count is more than double that of Doom’s 44,000 launch day equivalent in May 2016.
Doom Eternal has passed 100,000 peak concurrent players on Steam, after releasing today. Twitch viewers over 125k.
This is already more than 2x higher than Doom 2016's peak of 44k in May 2016.
Incredibly successful launch, esp given it was up against Animal Crossing too. pic.twitter.com/uMUnN4Zte7
— Daniel Ahmad (@ZhugeEX) March 20, 2020
It’s been an interesting launch for Doom Eternal. In the UK, video game shop GAME sold it two days before its official Friday 20th March release date in-store, without an announcement from publisher Bethesda but apparently with its blessing. And according to Ars Technica, Bethesda broke its own Denuvo protection for the shooter by releasing the Bethesda Launcher version with a DRM-free executable in a folder named “Original”.
Denuvo protection usually guarantees PC releases at least a few crack-free days at launch. But after eagle-eyed players spotted the DRM-free executable in the Original folder, they replaced the DRM-protected executable in the main game folder and ended up playing offline. According to reports, Bethesda has since patched the game to fix this apparent error, but of course the DRM-free version is all over the place now.
Perhaps the suits at Bethesda won’t be too bothered given Doom Eternal’s impressive Steam launch. See, Doom Eternal and Animal Crossing can co-exist.