Video Games

Space Marine 2 is officially the most popular Warhammer 40k game on Steam

A strong start for the third-person shooter

Marco Wutz

Saber Interactive

Saber Interactive and Focus Entertainment’s third-person shooter Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 celebrated its release on September 5, 2024, for players who bought the costlier Gold, Ultra, or Collector’s Editions, which come with four days of advanced access to the game – for buyers of the Standard Edition, the gates open on September 9, 2024.

It’s a release strategy that is becoming more and more popular among publishers – and more and more criticized by gamers. However, the results speak for themselves: SteamDB records 134,302 concurrent users for the game’s advanced access release day at its peak, making it 2024’s eleventh-biggest launch on Steam and the most popular Warhammer 40,000 game in history. This title was previously held by Warhammer 40,000: Darktide, which clocked in at a peak of 108,395 concurrent users.

Space Marine 2 didn’t quite take the crown for the entirety of the Warhammer franchise, though, as Creative Assembly and Sega’s Total War: Warhammer 3 still holds on to the higher peak of 166,754 players at once.

Still, over 134,000 people being prepared to lay down at least $30 USD on top of the regular price just to hop in over the weekend is a massive success for the developer and publisher. Since this is Saber Interactive’s first big release after its divorce from Embracer Group, this success is all the more important for the company, giving it some momentum in its first year of independence.

Space Marine 2 is the biggest hit on Steam by concurrent user count in the history of both Saber and Focus, showing the strong appeal a high-quality Warhammer 40,000 game holds – and with the weekend as well as the full release still to come, there are plenty of reasons to be optimistic for even better results in the near future.

Read our Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 review as well as our Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 tips for more information on the game and don’t forget to secure your Space Marine 2 Twitch Drops even if you don’t have access to the title yet.

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Marco Wutz
MARCO WUTZ

Marco Wutz is a writer from Parkstetten, Germany. He has a degree in Ancient History and a particular love for real-time and turn-based strategy games like StarCraft, Age of Empires, Total War, Age of Wonders, Crusader Kings, and Civilization as well as a soft spot for Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail. He began covering StarCraft 2 as a writer in 2011 for the largest German community around the game and hosted a live tournament on a stage at gamescom 2014 before he went on to work for Bonjwa, one of the country's biggest Twitch channels. He branched out to write in English in 2015 by joining tl.net, the global center of the StarCraft scene run by Team Liquid, which was nominated as the Best Coverage Website of the Year at the Esports Industry Awards in 2017. He worked as a translator on The Crusader Stands Watch, a biography in memory of Dennis "INTERNETHULK" Hawelka, and provided live coverage of many StarCraft 2 events on the social channels of tl.net as well as DreamHack, the world's largest gaming festival. From there, he transitioned into writing about the games industry in general after his graduation, joining GLHF, a content agency specializing in video games coverage for media partners across the globe, in 2021. He has also written for NGL.ONE, kicker, ComputerBild, USA Today's ForTheWin, The Sun, Men's Journal, and Parade. Email: marco.wutz@glhf.gg

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