It's only been three days since Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice was released, but FromSoftware's latest installment is officially Steam's biggest launch of 2019. The Demon Souls, Dark Souls, and Bloodborne successor climbed its way up the charts into the top five most-played games, beating out 2019 releases Devil May Cry 5 and the Resident Evil 2 Remake. It has a ways to go before it reaches the top three, but it's a massive accomplishment for a single-player RPG on the PC gaming platform.

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice was first announced at Microsoft's E3 press conference in 2018. Though the combat style and difficulty appears similar to FromSoftware's other titles, the story is very different. This time around, the developers branched from their usual medieval horror-fantasy tone and centered their story in more of a historical time in Japan, telling a tale of a Sengoku period shinobi named Sekiro who seeks revenge on samurai who attacked him as a child and kidnapped his lord.

In a comparison to FromSoftware's previous titles Sekiro falls just short of the studio's best performance. Dark Souls III currently remains the company's most successful launch on Steam, with over 129,000 concurrent players when it was first released, roughly only 5,000 ahead of Sekiro's current stats. According to Eurogamer, the game has a ways to go before it breaks the top three games on Steam. In order to become the most-played game on the platform, it would need to attain roughly 800,000 more players in order to knock out Dota 2, which currently holds the top spot.

With these opening weekend numbers, the possibility is high for Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice to remain the biggest Steam launch in 2019. According to Steam Charts, the game peaked at 124,344 concurrent players, beating every single-player title other than Grand Theft Auto V. The game has also proven to be the third-largest Japanese game after Monster Hunter World and FromSoftware's previous franchise trilogy-ender, Dark Souls III.

Clearly, FromSoftware is unafraid to jump into new territory. It's a refreshing outlook from a studio that had already found a niche for itself in the Souls series: while Sekiro definitely leans on a lot of the tropes fans came to expect out of FromSoftware, it also introduces a lot of new design elements that make it more modern. If nothing else, the game's Steam sales show that fans have the studio's back when it comes to trying new things, and that should be exciting news for anyone looking for a challenging action-RPG in the near future. Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is currently available on PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4.