Final Fantasy 7 players have clearly been eager to find out what happens to fan favourite Aerith, as Rebirth sees way more players at launch on PC than Remake.
Look, I won’t spoil anything for anyone that hasn’t played the original Final Fantasy 7 or its remakes, but most of us know what happens to Aerith, it’s like the Darth Vader “I am your father” of video game spoilers. So, with Remake implying that things might be different going forward during its ending, there were a lot of questions surrounding whether or not she would survive in Rebirth. And it seems like now that the sequel has been released on PC, those that want to know and don’t own a PS5 (or have just been holding off) have flocked to find out. Earlier today, Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth hit a concurrent player count peak of 39,857 players, just three days after it launched on the platform (via SteamDB).
For comparison, Final Fantasy 7 Remake Intergrade launched on Steam back in 2022, and only had a peak of 13,803 players. There’s a couple of reasons as to why the game didn’t do all that well compared to Rebirth, one notably being that it had been released on the Epic Games Store half a year prior, so there might have been PC players who had already picked it up there. The other reason might be that the Steam Deck had only been released that year, so there’s always the chance that a lot of players have picked up Rebirth because there are more that own a Steam Deck three years down the road.
This will obviously be good news for Square Enix, given that last year it realised it really needs to take a multiplatform approach if it actually wants to make any money these days, and based on some comments from last month, we can probably expect the third and final part to come out on other platforms too.