Is Umbrella Corps on the PC dying or merely off to a slow start? This is the question that needs to be asked when looking at the stats for Capcom's most-recent Resident Evil spin-off.
As you may recall, Umbrella Corps launched in North America on Tuesday, June 21 to very little fanfare. Part of the reason for this was that there was a general pessimism about the game ever since it was announced at the Tokyo Game Show in 2015.
At the time, fans and critics likened the game to another Resident Evil spin-off, Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City, and were quick to dismiss it. Unfortunately, things only got worse for the game later down the road, with early previews of the game looking less than stellar.
The other reason was that Mighty No. 9 released that same day, and headlines from gaming websites were dominated by anything that came to mind about the game, ranging from the reportedly lackluster and repetitive gameplay to the infamous "better than nothing" quote, which many thought creator Keiji Inafune said about his own product. In fact, there was so much news about the game on Tuesday and Wednesday that it looked like nearly everyone forgot Umbrella Corps even existed.
Well, if the statistics from Steam are anything to go by, then it's highly possible that most people did actually forget the game existed, or at least came out.
According to SteamCharts, a site that analyzes the number of players on Steam, Umbrella Corps reached an all-time peak of 428 players since it came out for PC on Tuesday. In fact, as of writing this, the last update the site made indicates that 79 are playing.
If accurate, these are frightfully low numbers, especially for a competitive multiplayer game that takes inspiration from one of the most revered series of all time. Are these numbers indicative of the fact that many people apparently "forgot" the game existed, or that only 28 percent of the 518 users who commented on the game on Steam gave it a positive review?
Of course, this doesn't necessarily mean that the game as a whole was a flop, as these alleged numbers only apply to Umbrella Corps on the PC. For all we know, the game could be doing rather well on the PS4 and Xbox One (therefore well as a whole), though that might be hard to determine until Capcom or Sony reveals something official.
