Before Valve shut down an achievement-based workaround for finding player counts on Steam, SteamSpy creator Sergey Galyonkin compiled information on about 13,000 games – and that data suggests that Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus has struggled in sales, at least on PC.
Twinfinite noticed Wolfenstein 2’s disappointing sales numbers while combing through Galyonkin’s data. By the beginning of July this year, Steam had logged just 549,457 players for Wolfenstein 2, well below numbers for other Bethesda titles like Prey (704,179 players) and Dishonored 2 (1.1 million).
These figures only represent the number of players on Steam, of course, and so they don’t include sales for console. Still, it’s an undeniable slump for one of Bethesda’s oldest properties. Machine Games’ first game in the rebooted series, Wolfenstein: The New Order, has amassed 1.8 players on Steam to date. Doom, which came out in 2016, has more than 3 million players on Steam.
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As Twinfinite notes, Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus hasn’t been on sale for nearly as long as those older titles, but the first few months after release are generally where you’ll see a game’s highest sales numbers.
Here at PCGamesN, we gave The New Colossus high marks, and even named it one of the best games of 2017. The game received critical praise elsewhere too, with its PC version earning an 86% rating on Metacritic. A few critics, such as the late John Bain, found some of its new mechanics more frustrating than innovative.
Despite slow sales, Bethesda isn’t ready to give up on Wolfenstein just yet. The New Colossus is meant to be the second entry in a trilogy, and at E3 this year, the company unveiled Wolfenstein: Youngblood, a co-op spinoff featuring BJ’s daughters set in a dystopian 1980s.