Mortal Kombat 1, the 12th main installment in the long-running series, has just been released globally. Let’s take a look at its launch numbers available right now.
Launched on September 19 (owners of the Premium edition could start playing it five days earlier), Mortal Kombat 1 received positive reviews from critics. Its average Metascore currently ranges from 86 for the PS5 version, which has the most reviews, to 88 (Xbox Series X|S).
The Nintendo Switch version is definitely an outsider, with critics bashing it for framerate drops, bugs, egregious load times, and overall poor technical state.
At the moment of writing, Mortal Kombat 1 holds a “Mostly Positive” rating on Steam, with 77% of more than 2,000 user reviews being positive. On its first day of global launch, the game peaked at 38,129 concurrent users (CCU), according to SteamDB.
This is a pretty solid result for a fighting game, allowing MK1 to surpass Mortal Kombat 11, which had a peak of 35k CCU. However, there are two titles with better all-time numbers, Dragon Ball FighterZ (44k CCU) and Street Fighter 6, which came out earlier this year and peaked at 70,573 concurrent players.
Mortal Kombat 1 may attract more users over the weekend, but at this point, it is unlikely that the game will manage to drastically increase its peak CCU and overtake SF6. It is also worth noting that we don’t have publicly available data to track player interest on consoles.
Top 10 fighting games of all time on Steam by peak concurrent players*:
*Note that there are plenty of games on the platform using the “Fighting” tag, but the list below only includes more “traditional” titles in the genre (so there is no, say, For Honor)
- Street Fighter 6 — 70,573 CCU
- Dragon Ball FighterZ — 44,303 CCU
- Mortal Kombat 1 — 38,129 CCU
- Mortal Kombat 11 — 35,147 CCU
- Brawlhalla (free-to-play) — 34,816 CCU
- Guilty Gear Strive — 31,156 CCU
- Tekken 7 — 18,966 CCU
- Mortal Kombat X — 15,743 CCU
- Street Fighter V — 14,783 CCU
- Soulcalibur VI — 14,684 CCU
2023 seems like a great year for fans of the fighting genre, with Street Fighter 6 selling over 2 million copies in less than a week. Mortal Kombat 1 will also likely perform well commercially, plus there is Tekken 8 coming out in January 2024.
Based on launch numbers, MK1 looks like a solid addition to the 31-year franchise. It will also solidify Mortal Kombat’s title as the best-selling fighting IP with lifetime sales of 79 million copies, followed by Super Smash Bros. (72+ million units) and Street Fighter (50+ million copies).