Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero is already the biggest Steam launch in the franchise’s history and it’s not even technically out yet

Fans have been waiting a very long time for a new Budokai Tenkaichi game, and while Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero goes back to the subseries’ original Japanese name, it absolutely seems to be the follow-up everyone’s been dreaming of. It’s not even technically out yet, but it’s already managed the biggest Steam launch in Dragon Ball history.

Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero is currently out in early access, exclusively available to people who’ve spent $100 on the Deluxe Edition or $110 on the Ultimate Edition. It seems players are more than willing to pay that price, however. The game has debuted on Steam to a peak concurrent player count of 91,005, as SteamDB shows.

That’s by far the biggest launch a Dragon Ball game has ever had on Steam, up from the Dragon Ball FighterZ peak of 44,303 at its launch back in 2018. Sparking Zero has similarly outclassed the concurrent player records set by more traditional fighting games like Tekken 8 (49,977) and Street Fighter 6 (70,573), and it’s managed to become the biggest licensed anime game in Steam history, too.

Our Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero review calls it “the pinnacle of fanservice,” and it’s clearly met its audience. It’s also been kicking the crap out of that audience – some are calling the difficulty of a few story mode fights “fucking absurd,” and the complaints about the Great Ape Vegeta battle in particular have gotten so common that even Bandai Namco is memeing about it.

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