The release of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl caused a great deal of excitement. Players trying to simultaneously download the new GSC Game World shooter even temporarily shut down the Internet in Ukraine. In addition, yesterday S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 set a Steam online record for Ukrainian games, with 113,587 stalkers exploring the Zone at the same time.

Of course, these are not the results of Black Myth: Wukong (2.4 million players simultaneously), Palworld (2.1 million), Baldur’s Gate 3 (875 thousand), or even Farming Simulator 25 (135 thousand), but let’s not forget that the game was released in the middle of the week and immediately on Game Pass. Also, many Ukrainian players simply didn’t have time to download the game due to the same problems with the Internet and power outages. All this had to affect the results of Steam online. Let’s take a look at the numbers that S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 will show this weekend.

In any case, the results of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chernobyl on Steam are already very good and this is a record for games made in Ukraine. Some time ago, we evaluated the most successful Ukrainian games by sales based on open data. This time, we were interested in comparing Ukrainian projects by the number of players on Steam online. Although these figures do not show the financial success of the game, they clearly demonstrate the excitement, hype around the project, and the interest of players in it. So, which Ukrainian games had the largest Steam online reach? All figures below are based on SteamDB data.

 

Top 10 Ukrainian games by number of simultaneous players on Steam
1. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl – 113 587 players
2. Shatterline – 21 760
3. Metro Exodus – 15 375
4. Metro 2033 – 14 743
5. Warface – 13 867
6. Mount & Blade: With Fire & Sword – 9 315
7. Cossacks 3 – 5 797
8. Cliff Empire – 3 099
9. Sherlock Holmes: The Devil’s Daughter – 2 968
10. Metro: Last Light Redux – 2 819

 

Please note that Shatterline is no longer available on Steam and will be relaunched soon on the Epic Games Store. As for Warface, developed in Kyiv, this game is now developed and controlled by Russians from MY.GAMES (Mail.ru Group). However, Warface showed the best online figures 10 years ago, during the launch and support of Crytek Kyiv, and now only 100-500 people play this shooter on Steam.

 

And since it’s S.T.A.L.K.E.R. week, let’s compare the maximum Steam online of all the games in the series:

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl – 113 587 players
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl – 2,308
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat – 1,359
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky – 889

Interestingly, the maximum online S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl was in April 2022, when GSC Game World re-released the game on Steam, and S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat at the time of its original release on Steam in 2010. S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky showed the largest online audience in June 2021.