Realm Royale is the free-to-play battle royale spin-off from Hi-Rez Studios‘ popular Paladins, but unlike other battle royale games such as Fortnite or PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, or even Hi-Rez’s other games, it’s not doing so hot. In fact, just two months after launching, Realm Royale seems to have lost around 96% of its player base.
That’s a staggering drop, and it comes just two days after Hi-Rez announced that it was creating three new developers specifically to work on three of its games – Paladins, Smite, and Realm Royale. The drop was reported by Githyp, and backed up by Steamdb.info. At its peak on June 10, positive word-of-mouth and support from streamers such as Ninja, Summit1g, Lirik, and TimTheTatman pushed Realm Royale to an impressive player count of around 105K.
While the exact percentage differs depending on which date and time you pick, on August 13 the game was down to an average of around 3.5K players. That’s approximately a 96% drop in players in just two months. Why such a dramatic drop? A brief glance at the Realm Royale Steam page shows a ‘Mixed’ rating and a lot of unhappy player reviews. The primary complaint seems to be balancing issues, with developer updates exacerbating the problem rather than fixing it.
At the moment Realm Royale is PC-only, although it seems fairly likely that it will come to Xbox One, PS4, maybe Switch and even mobile phones too, especially with a brand new studio working exclusively on it. Of course the question is if the game will survive long enough to transition to other platforms. The battle royale genre is currently the hottest gaming fad around, but it also can be the most brutal to anyone trying to break into it. Fortnite and PUBG have most of the market sewn, and even big names like Cliff Bleszinski are unable to make a splash.
