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Phantom Blade Zero passes 600,000 players on Steam on day one, and S-Game says roll back your NVIDIA driver

By PPRGaming · October 29, 2026

Official Phantom Blade Zero screenshot of a swordsman in a straw hat holding a long weapon as a burst of fire erupts behind him on a burning battlefield
Image: S-GAME

Phantom Blade Zero is out, and Steam is busy. S-Game’s wuxia action game unlocked on Steam at about 9:45 PM ET on Wednesday, and by about 7 AM ET Thursday it had hit 603,132 concurrent players, according to SteamDB. That’s its all-time peak so far, and SteamDB also has it at #1 in Steam’s top sellers. The game is out on PC and PS5, and Sony doesn’t share player counts, so the Steam number is only part of the picture.

How players are taking it. It had about 9,300 Steam user reviews at that point, with roughly 82% positive for a Very Positive rating, per SteamDB. Critics were already on board: our reviews roundup had it at 88 on Metacritic and 91 on OpenCritic.

Earlier in the night. IGN reported a peak of about 448,000 a few hours after launch, behind only Counter-Strike 2 among the most-played games on Steam, and said it was the best-selling game on Steam by revenue, ahead of Modern Warfare 4.

The launch letter. Creative director and S-Game CEO Soulframe Liang posted a long letter on Steam on Wednesday, ahead of launch, called “Reason and Madness”. He traces the game back to Rainblood: Town of Death, an RPG Maker hobby project he made as a student about 20 years ago, and says the studio cancelled its other projects to focus on Phantom Blade Zero. “I am deeply grateful to the team for their understanding and support. We did it,” he wrote.

Three practical notes from S-Game. At the end of the letter, Liang passed along:

  • A day-one patch of about 5GB that “significantly improves” ray tracing and path tracing performance, plus bug fixes. If you pre-loaded, install it before launching. Fresh downloads already include it.
  • The team spent a lot of time on the rasterized visuals so the game holds up with ray tracing off, and it has tested on mid-range and lower-end PCs and handhelds.
  • S-Game has seen performance instability with NVIDIA’s 621.01 driver. It recommends rolling back to 617.42 with a clean install and staying there until NVIDIA’s next driver, which it expects “soon.”

PPR take: 600K on Steam alone for a brand-new IP is huge. If you’re on a newer NVIDIA driver and the game is stuttering, try that 617.42 rollback before anything else.

Sources