Doom: The Dark Ages reaches major success milestone, Bethesda confirms

Doom: The Dark Ages is apparently a hit for id Software and Bethesda with over 3 million players on all platforms in the first week since game launch.

Doom: The Dark Ages reaches major success milestone, Bethesda confirms
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TL;DR: Doom: The Dark Ages surpassed 3 million players within a week, outperforming Doom Eternal’s by seven times, largely due to its availability on Xbox Game Pass and Battle.net. This highlights Microsoft’s successful subscription strategy, driving high player engagement despite lower Steam concurrent user counts.

Doom: The Dark Ages actually did exceptionally well in terms of player count, reaching more than 3 million people since launch, significantly beating player numbers for Doom Eternal.

Doom: The Dark Ages reaches major success milestone, Bethesda confirms 13
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Early reports suggested that Doom: The Dark Ages wasn't doing all that well, at least when it comes to Steam adoption. The game ended up having the lowest concurrent player count on Steam out of all the modern-day Doom trilogy games. The Dark Ages currently sits at #85 on Steam's concurrent user peak with little over 15,000 gamers playing--which is about half of its all-time peak of 31,470 users. This is just one very small sampling of The Dark Ages' user base, though.

Bethesda today confirmed that Doom: The Dark Ages reached 3 million players in around a week after the FPS' official launch: "Thank you for making DOOM: The Dark Ages the biggest launch in id's history - 7x faster to 3 million players than DOOM Eternal."

The last bit is particularly interesting because Doom Eternal did not launch onto Xbox Game Pass, neither the console version nor Xbox Game Pass PC. The Dark Ages, however, released on both of these subscriptions on day one, and is also being sold on Blizzard's Battle.net PC store.

The large discrepancy between Bethesda's reported players and the concurrent Steam user count suggests that Microsoft's Game Pass strategy is working well, and that Dark Ages may have been mostly played on Game Pass, at least on PC. Microsoft gaming CEO Phil Spencer has repeatedly said that Game Pass on PC is growing quickly, and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella noted that Game Pass PC revenues were up 45% last quarter.

Bear in mind we don't know exact sales, and that Xbox has instead relied more on how many millions of players that a game has versus raw sales numbers. This is because Game Pass access is mixed in, obfuscating specific performance metrics by lumping everything together, and Microsoft puts high importance on subscription-based engagement instead of just focusing on how many units are sold.