Summary
Until Dawn’sremake launched last week on both PS5 and Steam, though to say it hasn’t set the world on fire would be an understatement. Comparison videos were made shortly before release, with commentsfull of people criticizing the title for looking “way worse"than the original,stripping away its atmosphere to chase realism. It also had more than a few technical issues too,as the game launched to Mixed reviews on Steam.
All of those issues - combined with the game’s less than stellar marketing on PlayStation’s part - now seem to have come together perfectly to deliver this year’s most abysmal high-profile launch on the platform.According to True Trophies, the player count for Until Dawn on PlayStation 5 upon launch is one of the worst that the console has seen this year, and is somehow 28.6 percent smaller than even Concord’s player count at launch.
This is the very sameConcordthat bombed so hard that PlayStation had toremove it from both its own storefront and Steam just two weeks after launch, and offer everyone that bought it a no-questions asked refund. Until Dawn is admittedlydoing better on Steam than Concord did, though it only manageda peak player count of 2,607while launching on a new platform for the first time. That still isn’t great.
There are most likely a number of factors at play here, including the fact that PlayStation is charging full price for a remake of a game that isn’t even a decade old at this point, and one that many fans are claiming looks worse than the original. you’re able to still grab the original Until Dawn for next to nothing on the second-hand market, and it looks like there just isn’t enough incentive to pay full price for the remake.
There’s also the fact that the game’s marketing has been pretty lackluster.Ever since the title was revealed back in January, there have been barely any trailers or marketing outside of official PlayStation channels, and I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that a lot of people were caught out by the game’s release earlier this month.
In any case, it’s not a great signfor PlayStation’s upcoming remaster endeavors, which includea remaster of Horizon Zero Dawn. Of course, Horizon is far more popular than Until Dawn, and will almost definitely be marketed more thoroughly as a result, but the sheer lack of people interested in a remake of a game that was already widely available and well-received may indicate that Horizon could share similar struggles.
Until Dawn
WHERE TO PLAY
Until Dawn is a remake of the hit horror game for PS5 and PC, featuring updated visuals, lighting, and new content using the power of Unreal Engine 5. It follows five people stranded in a ski lodge, who find themselves hunted by a terrifying killer.
