Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth has finally ambled its way over to PC, and it's landing with—hold your breath—moderate to solid success! Please imagine me firing some party poppers at your leisure. As seen on the game's SteamDB page, Rebirth has thus far enjoyed a peak concurrent player count of around 40,000, which is none too shabby.
While "big franchise does solid" is not super interesting in itself, it's a curiouser number when lined up against other entries in the franchise. It is (aside from Final Fantasy 14, which is an MMO and enjoyed an exodus of WoW players during Shadowlands) the highest-ranking peak concurrent player count in the series (via VGC).
That puts it a clean 13,056 hype measurements above Final Fantasy 16, the latest game in the series, that pulled in 27,508 players at its peak. It's an actually downright impressive leap when compared to the first FF7 remake, though—which you'd expect to be higher, given how pessimistic Square has been about Rebirth's comparative performance. But, no, that peaked at a considerably humble 13,803 players on Steam.
You have to wonder if this solid hit on PC will help convince Square Enix to continue pushing its new multiplatform strategy. It's not been a great year or so for console gaming, with dropping sales and faltering confidence making me wonder why the company's stuck with being console-first in the first place.
I'd even go one step further and wager that Square's current market—the kind who'd want to run a glossy, high-fidelity remake of a classic RPG—is going to shell out the extra cash for a PC anyway, what with how a beast of a tower'll play to these game's strengths. PC Gamer's own Fraser Brown, owner of a big stonking TV and equally stonking PC, actually attempted to play the PS5 version of FF16 and "quit, turned my PS5 off, and went back to streaming my PC" not but five minutes later in a 4k deprivation-induced ragequit.
There's also, uh—mods. I'm going to put this delicately, but it's Final Fantasy 7, and there is a not-insignificant contingent of players who are more likely to mod out a game featuring Aerith Gainsborough, Tifa Lockhart and—let's face it, Cloud Strife—for reasons of personal aesthetic tastes. No matter how much the developers beg them not to. I don't think that'd be the major driving factor behind a nearly 30,000 peak player bump, though I could be wrong.
Anyway—while I remain unconvinced Square Enix won't have a moan about it under-selling some stratospheric sales target, as is tradition, this does seem like a solid sign for the future of PC Final Fantasy ports, which are also ramping up in actual quality. Now I will cross my fingers and wish upon a Moogle for day one releases in the future. We'll treat you better than the PlayStation players do, babe, I promise.
