The number of players diving into Dragon Ball: Sparking! ZERO dropped by roughly 90% after its explosive release with 3 million sales in the first 24 hours.
Bandai Namco's latest entry in the Tenkaichi Budokai series surpassed every other single fighting game in the genre in terms of its peak player count on Steam. The only exception to this was Warner Bros.' MultiVersus.
Losing a Lot of Players
These were very promising signs during the early stages of the game and suggested that Dragon Ball: Sparking! ZERO would have a comfortable time moving forward. But the fighting game just lost the majority of its playerbase within a month from launch.
Data from SteamDB showed that the game's number of players currently playing were around 14,000. This was significantly fewer than the recorded 122,554 peak 31 days ago when the game was first released on Oct. 11, 2024.
This is a natural development for any game as a lot of people will be very interested while a particular title is still in its early stages.
But the massive drop in playercount is reportedly due to many complaints that players are dealing with in terms of the game's balancing, according to Event Hubs.
One of the more notable issues that people have had about the game is that there are a lot of cheating and other people rage quitting in the middle of an online match.
The latter is also an issue because it means that the winner will receive no benefits from the battle even if they are in an advantageous position.
Developers of Dragon Ball: Sparking! ZERO recently issued a warning to players that people who were using mods in the Custom Battle mode would receive consequences. If caught using such systems, they will be banned.
Dragon Ball: Sparking! ZERO's Success
Another issue that people have had with the game is its problematic balance. One particular character, Yajirobe, received a major nerf after he was deemed overpowered by the community, The Gamer said.
Players also struggled with what seems to be an overly difficult single-player campaign in Dragon Ball: Sparking! ZERO. Great Ape Vegeta is a particularly challenging opponent that many people have had a hard time dealing with.
Bandai Namco previously revealed that about 90% of the game's total sales came from players who lived in Europe and North America.
The studio also talked about how it promoted the game to the community. It apparently focused on social networking pushes in some regions and in-person events in others, according to Games Radar.
