Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth is a major hit on Steam

Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth has become the biggest single-player Final Fantasy game to launch on Steam, earning over 40,000 concurrent players on launch (via PC Gamer). While it hasn’t quite eclipsed the peaks of Final Fantasy XIV – which is an MMORPG with an always-online global, passionate fanbase – it’s now the most popular mainline Final Fantasy game on Steam, by a significant margin.

Its peak eclipses that of Final Fantasy 16 by a good 13,000 players, and it’s also frog-leaped over its direct predecessor, Final Fantasy 7 Remake, which had an all-time peak of just 13,800 players. There’s a wild difference here, and a plethora of potential explanations.

Final Fantasy 7 Remake was a PlayStation 4 exclusive for quite some time after launch, and the announcement of a PC version arrived much later. The game also launched around the pandemic lockdowns, which may have buoyed immediate interest and sales for the title, rather than patience for its launch on other platforms.

With Remake‘s eventual arrival on PC, it seemed very likely that Rebirth would get the same treatment. It appears many were simply waiting for the game to launch on PC, whether for this platform’s graphical power, its modding tools, or for other, unclear reasons. Whatever the case, it appears Rebirth is a surprise hit on PC.

Read: Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth – Review

What’s most surprising about this sudden success is that Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth underperformed on Square Enix’s expectations when it launched on PlayStation 5. In fact, it continued to sell under expectations, as of May 2024. Now, thanks to the game’s success on PC, some of this gap appears to be closing.

Square Enix is likely to be fairly chuffed with this development, and in all likelihood, it may inspire the company’s recent push for more multi-platform game releases. In November 2024, the company confirmed more of its titles would release simultaneously on more platforms, as a means to allow more people to play these games.

At the time, this discussion revolved around the launch of Fantasian Neo Dimension, which arrived on new consoles after a period of Apple Arcade exclusivity, but the company appeared keen to pursue a multi-platform for its biggest franchises, as a whole.

With Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth underperforming on PlayStation 5, but getting a major second wind on PC, the value of this strategy has been made fairly clear. What’s also been made clear is that Final Fantasy fans are well-represented on the PC platform, and that future games may avoid financially underwhelming via cross-platform launches.

We’ll have to wait to see whether Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth‘s surprise success will notably change Square Enix’s release plans in future.