We’re now over five weeks on from Crimson Desert‘s launch, but you might not think it looking at the concurrent player count for Pearl Abyss’s open-world behemoth on Steam, which is still regularly hitting six-figure peaks.
It’s just the way of life for most single-player games: inevitably, player counts dwindle significantly after launch. There’s an incredibly simple reason for that – wait long enough, and that initial rush of people wanting to play the game have finished it. Sure, you’ll have some folks who might go back in for a second run, or new players who didn’t start it at launch, but generally speaking, you can expect a fairly significant drop-off.
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A month later, the single-player Crimson Desert has retained half of its launch players pic.twitter.com/8lHI1kTM2wApril 26, 2026
One thing that’s worth remembering when looking at this data though, like Something Wicked Games founder and former Bethesda project lead Jeff Gardiner points out, “CCU is *not* retention.” As he explains, “These could just be wholly new players that bought the game a month in. It’s probably a mix of both.”
With that said, even though it wouldn’t be fair to assume that all the players we see now were part of that initial launch rush, the figures still show a resounding level of continued popularity that we don’t see all that often with single-player games.
Pearl Abyss’s constant updates will definitely be helping in this regard. Last week, the open-world adventure got its biggest patch to date, adding new difficulty settings, addressing in-game storage complaints, and – most importantly – adding an item to let cats sit on your shoulder for longer. With even more improvements on the way, I can see the player count holding strong for some time to come – and we’re not even looking at the data on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S.
Not taken the plunge into Pearl Abyss’s massive open world yet? Check out our Crimson Desert review to find out why it’s one of the hottest new games for 2026.
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