Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart is the latest PlayStation game ported to PC. While it got attention thanks to the use of DirectStorage 1.2, its launch numbers are quite unimpressive compared to SIE’s other first-party titles on Steam.
Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart’s PC launch compared to other PlayStation games
Launched on July 26, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart only peaked at 8,757 concurrent players (CCU) on Steam (via SteamDB).
It currently holds a “Very Positive” rating based on 670 user reviews, with 84% of them being positive.
This makes Rift Apart the third worst launch on PC for a PlayStation game, only above Returnal (6,691 CCU) and Sackboy: A Big Adventure (610 CCU). There is also a PC version of Helldivers, with 6,744 peak CCU, but its developer Arrowhead is not SIE’s first-party studio.
Here are the top 5 tiles from PlayStation Studios by peak CCU on Steam:
- God of War — 73,529 CCU, 96% rating (based on 75k reviews);
- Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered — 66,436 CCU, 96% rating (based on 51k reviews);
- Horizon Zero Dawn — 56,557 CCU, 87% rating (based on 74k reviews);
- The Last of Us Part I — 36,496 CCU, 59% rating (based on 20k reviews);
- Days Gone — 27,450 CCU, 92% rating (based on 43k reviews).
Top 10 PlayStation-published games on PC by peak CCU (via SteamDB)
What about Rift Apart’s technical state and the SSD buzz?
The PC version of Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart was developed by Insomniac Games in collaboration with Nixxes Software, a studio behind the ports of Horizon Zero Dawn and Marvel’s Spider-Man.
One of the key features of Rift Apart is the ability to hop between different dimensions, which was marketed as something only possible thanks to PS5’s fast SSD, i.e. technically impossible on PS4. Although the PC version can run on an HDD, the experience is definitely not the same (or, frankly said, really bad).
As clearly seen in Digital Foundry’s test, there is not much difference between using 3.5GB/s and 7.1GB/s NVMe drives, but those dimension-hopping sequences get extremely painful with slower SATA SSDs or HDDs.
Rift Apart also became the first PC game to incorporate GPU decompression through the DirectStorage 1.2 API to speed up load times and asset streaming. As Nixxes told Digital Foundry, larger assets such as textures are decompressed using the GPU, while smaller assets like models are decompressed on the CPU.
However, the Rift Apart port is far from perfect. Nixxes did a great job with making the game run on different configurations and Steam Deck, but those portal transitions still seem complete faster on PS5 than even on high-end PCs, not to mention several less significant issues and bugs.