Grounded, Obsidian’s new experimental survival game, has debuted very strongly. The game launched on Steam Early Access and Xbox Game Preview yesterday, and has already shot up to the top of Steam’s best-sellers. As noted by @Benjisales, Grounded quickly became the top-selling game on Steam worldwide shortly after it went live. Though sales are impressive, particularly considering the game is freely available on Xbox Game Pass, the concurrent player numbers are nothing special.
Grounded peaked at 12,543 shortly after release, which is enough to land it near the bottom of Steam’s top 100 most played games. These numbers could, of course, improve over the course of the next few days. Nonetheless, the anticipation for Grounded was seemingly high. Yesterday also saw the game reach the top three spot on Twitch, in terms of viewers. Survival games often enjoy strong debuts on Steam, and this one seems be a little more fleshed out than most that drop in Steam Early Access. Grounded is a different game from a studio mostly know for its expansive RPGs. It’s also an experiment by a small Obsidian team, intended to explore whether that style of story could be told in a traditional survival game. So far, it seems to be paying off.
