Steam has released Returnal, a title that stayed exclusive to PlayStation 5 for almost two years before arriving on PC. The PC version, on Metacritic, drew praise from critics with a score of 87 out of 100 based on 20 reviews, signaling solid quality in the eyes of reviewers. Yet that critical approval did not translate into a large PC audience right away.
On the day of its PC launch, February 15, SteamDB tracked just a handful of players online at peak, with a peak concurrent count around 5.7 thousand. This level stood in stark contrast to Hogwarts Legacy, which reached about 900 thousand concurrent players at peak times, nearly two hundred times the activity seen for Returnal. The sustained player base for Sony’s PC releases also illustrates a slow start; on the morning of February 16, the online count dipped below three thousand.
From a broader perspective, the initial PC performance of Sony’s catalog looks to place Returnal toward the lower end of the spectrum. Among recent releases from Sony, only Sackboy: A Big Adventure, released earlier, managed to attract roughly six hundred ten players at its peak on the first day. The pattern suggests that even highly regarded exclusives face an uphill climb when crossing over to PC, where visibility and momentum often depend on a mix of marketing, platform dynamics, and the changing preferences of PC gamers.
In related coverage, Socialbites.ca reported that an advertisement for the Russian game Atomic Heart appeared in Times Square, a note that underscores how marketing placements continue to shape public perception and attention across major markets.