Sparking Zero lost 90 percent of its players

by

Key conclusions

  • Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero started strong, but lost 90% of its players within a month, affecting its success.

  • Issues such as balance issues and cheating complaints contributed to the game's decline.

  • Despite the drop, the game may recover with subsequent content releases and Bandai's history of supporting Dragon Ball games.

When Early Access launched on October 7th, Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero got off to a great start. Within 24 hours, the game became the most popular fighting game in Steam history, surpassing the likes of Street Fighter 6, Tekken 8 and Mortal Kombat 11.

A mod that adds Badman Vegeta's shirt to Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero.

Relatives

Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero fans have added some of their most beloved missing outfits

Vegeta is best suited in Sparking Zero.

However, less than a month later, the game is struggling to retain players, losing 90% of those who joined in the first few days.

Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero's Quick Fall

causing graphs of zero players to show a sharp decline

When it launched, public sentiment around Sparking Zero was great. It released with a score of 85% on Opencritic, 4.5/5 from us here at TheGamer, and sold three million copies in the first 24 hours. This led to the game peaking at 122,554 concurrent players, far more than its current players, with Street Fighter 6 holding the previous record of 70,540 players.

Fast forward a few weeks, and the game peaked at around 15,500 players in the last two days, a drop of over 87% since launch, according to SteamDB.

While such a drop is to be expected from a single-player title, a multiplayer game losing such a large portion of its player base in such a short period of time is concerning – Sparking Zero, coincidentally, has now failed to beat Street's daily concurrent count players in Fighter 6 from Sunday, October 27.

Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero peaked at around 15,500 players, a drop of over 87% since launch.

Dragon Ball: Sparking Zero has been marred by player complaints since launch. These are due to the game having serious balance issues, particularly with Yajirobe, unsportsmanlike players abusing “broken” mechanics, an influx of cheaters, and extremely difficult single player battles, prompting Bandai Namco to issue a statement, in which all probably contributed to the downfall of the game.

​​​​​​​Although the player count looks a bit bleak, there is still hope for Sparking Zero as Bandai usually supports its Dragon Ball games for extended periods of time. At the moment, the game has at least three additional pieces of content with 20 new characters, focusing on Dragon Ball Z: Super Hero and Dragon Ball Daima, so there is plenty of time for the redemption arc.

dragon-ball-sparking-zero-cover-art.jpg

Considered part of the Budokai Tenkachi series, Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero is an in-development arena fighter developed by Spike Chunsoft and published by Namco Bandai.

Leave a Comment