Supergiant Games has just released Hades II in Early Access on Steam and the Epic Games Store. The game has already become one of the biggest launches of 2024 in terms peak concurrent players.
Launched on May 6, Hades II is an action roguelite that continues the story of the first game and puts the player in the role of Hades’ daughter Melinoë on her quest to defeat Chronos and save her family. It is also the first sequel in the history of Supergiant Games, which previously only made original titles.
Hades II currently has an “Overwhelmingly Positive” rating on Steam, with 98% of the 5,197 user reviews being positive. The score could change over the course of Early Access, but early players seem to be delighted with the game.
According to Supergiant, the EA version of Hades II “already has more environments, foes, and fully-voiced characters than the full version of the original Hades game.” However, it is still far from complete, and the studio more plans to add more content before version 1.0 launches.
Shortly after its EA launch, Hades II peaked at 79,276 concurrent players (via SteamDB). This is by far Supergiant’s biggest release on Steam by that metric. For comparison, the first Hades peaked at 37,749 CCU, but it is worth noting that it was exclusive to the EGS platform for a year before hitting Valve’s store.
These two titles are followed by Transistor (6.7k CCU), Bastion (4.1k CCU), and Pyre (4k CCU).
UPDATE: Hades II eventually peaked at 103,567 concurrent players.
With the 79.2k peak, Hades II also ranks 9th in the number of concurrent players among all new Steam releases of 2024:
- Palworld — 2.1 million CCU;
- Helldivers 2 — 458.7k CCU;
- Last Epoch — 264.7k CCU;
- Dragon’s Dogma 2 — 228.5 CCU;
- Content Warning — 204.4k CCU;
- Manor Lords — 173.1k CCU;
- Enshrouded — 160.4k CCU;
- Granblue Fantasy: Relink — 114k CCU;
- Hades II — 79.2k CCU;
- Gray Zone Warfare — 72.5k CCU.
The first Hades sold 700k copies during its EA period, brining in another 300k within just three days of its full release. Supergiant hasn’t disclosed official figures since then, but it is clearly the studio’s most successful game yet.
Hades II is expected to stay in Early Access at least until the end of 2024, with Supergiant planning to release a major update every few months while also polishing the game and adding various features and improvements.