Dragon Ball Sparking Zero player count plummets just a month after launch

Less than a month on from its impressive launch, Dragon Ball Sparking Zero has lost almost 90% of its player count on Steam amid concerns around balancing and cheating.

Dragon Ball Sparking Zero has been hailed as one of the best DB games of all time. Fans praised its recreation of the colorful battles from the anime and we called it a “must-play” in our glowing review.

This quality translated into sales too, as Bandai Namco announced it had sold three million copies in the first 24 hours. It also broke the record as the most-played fighting game on Steam shortly after its October 11 release date.

But not even a month later, the figures paint a much bleaker picture as many of the players who contributed to the record-breaking launch on Steam have moved on.

According to SteamDB, only 6,096 players are active at the time of writing and the peak count in the last 24 hours is just 14,303. This works out at a roughly 89% drop from its all-time peak player count of over 122,000 on launch day.

SteamDB

This isn’t an anomaly either, as the trend since launch has been a troubling one. The number of active users has declined steadily since day one, getting lower every single day apart from a couple of small upticks on October 19 and 26.

Of course, it’s worth keeping in mind that these figures only represent Steam and don’t take other platforms into account, including PlayStation and Xbox which will make up a large section of the player base. However, if the trend there is similar, the numbers don’t make for pleasant reading.

Although it’s difficult to say exactly why the player count is declining, there are few issues that could have contributed. The first is hackers on PC, who have been able to disrupt online matches by getting infinite Ki to unleash powerful abilities back-to-back.

Another concern has been balancing, as Sparking Zero aims to mimic the power of characters from the Dragon Ball universe rather than worrying about certain picks being OP. This has led to characters like Goku Black dominating matches.

The good news for Dragon Ball Sparking Zero is that there is a full roadmap of DLCs coming in 2025, featuring new characters from different corners of the DB universe, so there’s every chance that these expansions could bring players back to the game.