Despite only releasing a little more than three months ago, Bethesda and Arkane Studios’ first-person co-op shooter Redfall seems to already be dead, at least on Steam. At the start of 2023, Redfall stood as one of the biggest first-party games that Xbox would release over the course of the year. Unfortunately, Redfall didn’t come close to meeting expectations and has instead been one of the biggest disappointments that Xbox fans have seen in a long time. With this in mind, it looks like many have opted to skip out on playing Redfall completely.
Redfall Player Count Keeps Plummeting
As noted by those on Reddit recently, Redfall’s player count on Steam is basically nonexistent. When looking at data from SteamDB, which is a site that tracks usage on Steam, Redfall is only amassing roughly 20 players across the entire platform. As of this weekend, the game happened to peak at a mere 38 players in total, which is absolutely dreadful, to say the least.
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The big caveat with this situation is that this data only stems from Steam, which is likely the platform on PC that Xbox players interact with the least. Given that Redfall is available to play via Xbox Game Pass, there’s a good chance that many who have played Redfall for themselves have downloaded it through the Microsoft Store. Still, if this Steam data is indicative of how the shooter is performing on other platforms, it spells very bad news for Xbox and Bethesda.
Xbox Boss Admits to Redfall Disappointment
In light of Redfall failing to meet high expectations, Xbox boss Phil Spencer hasn’t avoided the criticism that has been aimed at the game. Stated in an interview not long after the launch of Redfall, Spencer said that he hated to disappoint Xbox fans with the game. He also noted that reviews for the title turned out to be much lower than Xbox anticipated, which is something that Spencer said those within Xbox have to take accountability for.
“There’s nothing that’s more difficult for me than disappointing the Xbox community,” Spencer said in an interview (transcribed by VGC) earlier this year of Redfall. “I’ve been a part of it for a long time. I obviously work on Xbox, I’m head of the business, I have a lot of friends and get a lot of feedback, and just to kind of watch the community lose confidence, be disappointed, I’m disappointed, I’m upset with myself.”
“We do mock reviews for every game that we launch, and this is double digits lower than where we thought we would be with this game through [those]. That’s one of the disappointing things: we would never strive to launch a game that we thought was going to review in the low 60s – it’s not part of our goals. If you look at our review scores over the past year – and this is not a defense at all – I think the teams have done a much better job in upping the level of quality of the games that we’ve shipped… and this game was significantly below our internal metrics compared to where it actually reviewed. But that’s not on anybody but us – we have to own that.”
Moving forward, Xbox fans are now looking forward to Starfield, which is set to launch on Xbox Series X/S and PC around the globe on September 6. Hopefully, the long-awaited RPG from Bethesda Game Studios pans out better than what was seen with Redfall.
