Zenless Zone Zero coming to Steam later this year

Zenless Zone Zero, a game I primarily associate with the neologism "gooner 9/11," is finally en route to PC's biggest digital storefront. This game produced a headline on this very website containing the phrases "divine domain," "jiggle physics," and "cat balls" all one right after the other. It got a glamorous 55% from reviewer Kerry Brunskill, who called it a "shallow, polished front for a relentless online store." In other words, it'll fit right in.

You can take a look at the game's new Steam page, which reveals a release window: Q2 2026. Prospective players can sign up for pre-release tests and secure exclusive rewards for the full launch. A "milestone event" will let the whole community unlock rewards by getting the game's wishlist numbers up, with the final goal being 300,000 wishlists. I can't say developer MiHoYo doesn't have this stuff down to a science.

What's perhaps surprising is that this is coming before the studio's other gacha hits, Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail. These games have had no trouble attracting an audience on PC without Steam (ZZZ alone had raked in 50 million downloads less than a week after launch), so it will be interesting to see if ZZZ's contemporaries follow suit.

Back in 2024, PC Gamer news writer Lincoln Carpenter predicted that the HoYoverse games had around a 40% chance of eventually landing on Steam. He reasoned that Steam's notorious 30% revenue cut was slightly more likely than not to dissuade MiHoYo from casting a wider net than the Epic Games Store can offer, and maybe that'll remain true for Genshin and Star Rail.

I imagine these games have enough cult appeal to where they don't strictly need Steam to stay afloat. The rub, of course, is that the Epic Games Store sucks. It sucks so bad that EGS vice president and general manager Steven Allison told Eurogamer it "sucks."—though the publisher is trying to be better. Maybe this release is to test the waters for MiHoYo's other live service titans, to see if they'll attract players who only try games on storefronts that don't suck.

If you're just itching to play, check out our tips to get started and prepare yourself for all the glorious grinding that awaits you.

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