Over a million people are estimated to have grabbed Mirage: Arcane Warfare for free

Mirage: Arcane Warfare has had a rough go of things. As of September 4th, Steam Spy estimated that just over 13,000 people owned the perfectly good magic brawler. When I checked early last week, Steam Charts showed the 24-hour peak concurrent player count at seven. Just seven people.

To get players into their game—in part to give those who bought it someone to play with—developer Torn Banner took a drastic step. For 24-hours last week, they made Mirage: Arcane Warfare completely free. If you added it to your Steam library, you could keep it.

According to Steam Spy's estimation, over 1.2 million people now own Mirage on Steam. The data isn't perfectly accurate—Steam Spy doesn't get raw ownership numbers and relies on automatically gathering data from Steam profiles—but even if the number is off by 200,000 owners, a million more people own Mirage than did before the promotion.

The new all time peak concurrent player count for Mirage now sits at 43,152, according to Steam Charts, meaning it would've been near the top of Steam's list of games by player count, somewhere around where Path of Exile and Rocket League are now. The concurrents have settled down now, with Steam Charts currently reporting just under a thousand for the 24-hour peak.

A thousand is a lot better than seven. In an update posted today, Torn Banner called the experiment a "huge success." The developer is currently working on issues caused by the influx of players, namely a problem with XP not being displayed correctly. Next up is another patch, which will add new modes.

After the free day, Mirage's price also dropped from $30 to $10. The question for Torn Banner now is whether or not they can keep the player count steady, and bring new players in at the new price—despite the huge number of Steam users who grabbed free copies.

Tyler grew up in Silicon Valley during the '80s and '90s, playing games like Zork and Arkanoid on early PCs. He was later captivated by Myst, SimCity, Civilization, Command & Conquer, all the shooters they call "boomer shooters" now, and PS1 classic Bushido Blade (that's right: he had Bleem!). Tyler joined PC Gamer in 2011, and today he's focused on the site's news coverage. His hobbies include amateur boxing and adding to his 1,200-plus hours in Rocket League.