The latest cooperative game from Josef Fares and his team at Hazelight Studios, titled “Split Fiction“, debuted on March 6 to an enormous opening weekend response.
On March 9th, a Sunday, the game boasted a record-breaking 259,003 simultaneous players on Steam. This number places it as the second most popular game ever published by EA on Steam in terms of concurrent users, with Apex Legends, the free-to-play battle royale game, being the only title to have more concurrent players. These figures were initially reported by Twisted Voxel and are sourced from SteamDB.
The top five EA games on Steam ranked by peak concurrent players are:
- Apex Legends – 624,473
- Split Fiction – 259,003
- Battlefield V – 116,104
- EA Sports FIFA 23 – 110,878
- EA Sports FC 25 – 110,026
It’s worth noting that Electronic Arts (EA) stayed away from Steam for some time, opting to release their games on their very own PC gaming platform. However, in the year 2019, they decided to return their games to Steam once more.
In terms of popularity and critical acclaim, Split Fiction surpasses Hazelight’s previous release, It Takes Two, significantly. Not only is Split Fiction widely popular, but it’s receiving exceptional praise. Our review on TopMob gave it a perfect score of 10/10. On our sister site Metacritic, Split Fiction has an impressive aggregate rating of 91, making it Electronic Arts’ first game in the past decade to achieve a rating of 90 or higher. The last game to rank this high was Mass Effect 3 in 2012.
It’s possible for someone to be playing Split Fiction without having purchased it directly. This is because the game offers a Friend’s Pass system, which means only one person needs to buy a copy, allowing others to play using their account. Moreover, Split Fiction is also accessible on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S platforms, so the number of copies sold on Steam may not fully reflect the game’s overall reach and popularity.
Information about the simultaneous number of players for both Sony and Microsoft’s platforms has not been shared concurrently, and so far, neither Electronic Arts (EA) nor Hazelight have disclosed any official figures regarding the player or sales count for Split Fiction.
The upcoming game faces significant expectations, given that Its Two predecessor astonishingly sold approximately 23 million units. Fares reported that the production cost of Split Fiction surpassed nearly twice that of Its Two.
Following the success of Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons with Starbreeze, Fares opted to establish his own independent game studio, Hazelight. This studio is particularly recognized for creating cooperative games exclusively, and has launched three such titles to date: A Way Out, It Takes Two, and Split Fiction. These games were all published by EA under its EA Originals imprint. To this day, Hazelight continues to operate as an independent game studio.
Fares openly expresses his disapproval towards microtransactions and live-service aspects, key components in EA’s business model. Since Hazelight recently launched Split Fiction, we don’t know yet what their future projects may entail or if they will continue working with EA.
Apart from creating games, Hazelight Studios is collaborating with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson on a live-action adaptation of the game It Takes Two for streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
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2025-03-10 18:10