The Finals may have had a successful launch at the end of last year, but it seems that there's a new sheriff in town with Pocketpair's new game, Palworld. Even though both belong to different genres, there is no question that one is affecting the other one indirectly.
A major shift in players' interest
Embark Studios launched The Finals at the beginning of December of last year and three days in, it reached more than 200k concurrent players only on Steam. As we can see on the game's SteamDB website, this remains the record and it set the game for a nice start commercially.
Although the number of users playing the game has been decreasing ever since, there was a bigger dip after January 21st, which is when Palworld's popularity truly set off. The maximum number of concurrent users for the shooter game during that day, which was a Sunday, was around 74k, and on the next day, it only reached around 57k.
The game hasn't recovered from this drop and even though it's not the end of the world, it shows that players are taking a break from the chaotic shooter to capture some Pals.
The Finals has not been the only game affected by Palworld's popularity, with other big Steam titles like Counter-Strike 2 or Dota 2 also suffering from a significant drop in their daily player counts after the date mentioned before. The only difference is that these aforementioned games got most of their users back within the next few days.
At the time of writing, Palworld is the number 1 game with the largest amount of users playing it on Steam at the same time, while The Finals sits at number 38. There's no way to get these metrics on the console versions of both games, but the story might be the same on that side.
For more news on The Finals and your favorite competitive shooters, don't forget to bookmark the site and visit it constantly. Also, you can follow us through our social media pages for more content about Rainbow Six Siege and other esports FPS titles.