What's extra wild about his is just how high Brawlhalla's numbers are compared to every other fighter on the list as the number one game overall but also the only platform fighter. Opening the door to more sub-genres puts four different games into the popularity ranks between Brawlhalla, Naruto Ultimate Ninja Storm 4, Jump Force and Demon Slayer: The Hinokami Chronicles. If we loosen our definitions of fighting games too just a bit to include arena and platform fighters, the top 10 chart actually changes pretty significantly. Those towards the bottom of the best are generally the oldest games of the bunch, games no longer receiving updates and / or not using rollback netcode though they're still among the best in the genre.įighterZ is likely still carried thanks in no small part to the Dragon Ball brand, but DBFZ is also the most popular game to feature Goku and friends on Steam, since it's surprisingly beating out Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2 on the platform. There is quite the disparity in player counts, however, once you get past the halfway point in the chart with numbers dropping sharply after DBFZ. This goes to show that publishers and developers were seemingly correct in choosing to support their titles with new content for years, as players will stick around their favorites or come back for big updates like we're seeing in BlazBlue and Skullgirls.
One very interesting aspect to take notice of is that the average age of the games on this list is 4.3 years old, and that's taking into account Strive only being on the market for only 6 months.
In fact, 8 out of the 10 top titles currently use rollback with Dragon Ball FighterZ and Granblue Fantasy: Versus being the only ones to still used delay-based netplay, although many will still debate whether Tekken 7 counts or not. Something that probably no one ever saw coming up until less than a month ago is that BlazBlue: Central Fiction is now the 4th most popular fighter on Steam thanks to its new rollback netcode beta, which has only been live for three weeks at this point, so those numbers would be even higher if we only counted from when the beta started.
This is likely due to the PC version of Tekken running overall better both offline and online on Steam as opposed to their console counterparts, which led to the competitive community to shift more and more to the computer space - hell, even Evo Online ran the game on PC this year despite Sony themselves owning the tournament series now.Īs the newest game on the list, it's not so surprising to see Guilty Gear retaining its edge over Street Fighter 5 for the number two position with a 2,522 player average and 7,690 peak over the past 30 days. Using Steam Charts' active player data, we were able to chart out the top 10 fighters on the platform using the 30-day average and peak numbers for the titles where there's some notably wide gaps between the top and bottom of even this small of a sample size.Īs has pretty much been the case for years now outside of like the first few months following Strive and Mortal Kombat 11's launches, Tekken 7 is currently the top dog among traditional fighters on Steam with an average of active players over the past month at 4,437 and peak players at 8,323.