While it's obvious that Yu-Gi-Oh! as a franchise enjoys lots of attention from across the world, it's still incredible to see it outpace its established competition to such an extent. Namely, Yu-Gi-Oh!Master Duel has managed to attract about twice as many concurrent players as its runner-up, Prismata, and almost four times as many as Valve's own Artifact Classic.
Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel has launched just a few days back, on January 19th, only to completely dominate the card game niche on Steam. With more than 240,000 concurrent players on PC alone, it has already reached the levels of immediate popularity that go far beyond anything a card game had previously managed on Valve's gaming platform.
Drawing data from Steamcharts, which keeps track of all player base information on Steam, Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel reached its record number of concurrent players three days after its initial launch. The specific all-time peak was 241,038 players, which compares extremely favorably to games such as Artifact Classic and Shadowverse, with 60,740 and 23,929 concurrent players respectively. Curiously, the second-highest number of concurrent players for a card game was that of Prismata, a niche early access title which reached its historical peak of 121,154 players back in 2018, only to never reach it again.
None of the other popular TCG franchises have managed to get numbers that are even close to those of Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel. The previous version of Yu-Gi-Oh! on PC hovered around 20,000 concurrent players at best, while Magic: The Gathering games never seem to get much in the way of mainstream attention. GWENT, too, has never had more than 5,000 players playing the game at the same time, which may seem at odds with the zeitgeist it once commanded.
Being a proper free-to-play title, Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel has done well to secure a massive player base right off the bat. It remains to be seen how many players stick with the game, of course, but it's hard to imagine that any of its competitors could beat it at this point in time. Naturally, since these are just the statistics for the PC/Steam version of Master Duel, and since the game launched on an extremely wide variety of other platforms (including mobile devices), the actual number of players enjoying the game at any given time is certainly far greater.
It's interesting to witness Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel dominating this niche to such an extent, but players seem to have been waiting for a new card game to jump on. Valve's Artifact Classic seems to be doing fine nowadays, too, but it seems unlikely to reach the levels of success that Master Duel has already reached so early in its lifetime.
Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel is now available on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series, Nintendo Switch, iOS, and Android platforms.
Source: SteamCharts
