Both Stellar Blade and Dune: Awakening shot into Steam's top 100 with new concurrent player peaks yesterday

The sexiest game out there broke a new concurrent player record over the weekend. That's right—Dune: Awakening broached the top 100 most-played games of all time on Steam, netting a peak concurrent player count of 189,333 players online on Sunday. That puts it at a happy 85 on SteamDB's chart of most-played games, sandwiched between Football Manager 2020 (84) and the Enhanced Edition of GTA 5 (86).

Just edging it out, though, was Shift Up's character action game Stellar Blade at position 81, between Total War: Three Kingdoms (80) and A Story About My Uncle (82), which are all pretty much the same game.

Even though our Mollie Taylor came away a tad mixed on the game in her Stellar Blade review, it's gone over pretty well with Steam users. 192,078 of them poured into the game on Sunday, while the game itself has a 94% Very Positive rating over in the Steam user reviews. I reckon it's thanks to the smut mods.

I, of course, predicted the Dune half of this in a story last week about the game hitting 142k players on its first proper launch day. Am I some kind of seer? Or perhaps a genius? Yes, but also pretty much everyone anticipated this. Last weekend was both Dune and Stellar Blade's first one after their respective releases, so it only makes sense that a bunch of people fired them up while hanging out at home on a day off.

It's not Stellar Blade's only win these last few days. Earlier today, Shift Up took to social media to thank fans for 3 million copies sold, and it continues to hold strong at sixth place in Steam's own top sellers list. Dune: Awakening, meanwhile, is at number one. Presumably Dune's denizens (dunezens) are enjoying themselves as much as PCG's Chris Livingston in his Dune: Awakening review-in-progress.