Space Marine 2 reaches 225,000 concurrent Steam users within hours of release

Warhammer 40,000 Space Marine 2 has been released in its entirety and, as the immortal Emperor himself would say (if he could speak or share any coherent thoughts), it is a banger.

Space Marine 2 is available to preordered Gold and Ultra editions since September 5, but now that it's live, we can see how it's doing. The short version of the story is that it's pretty damn good. Within a few minutes of launch, Space Marine 2 had surpassed 200,000 concurrent Steam players (the current peak is 225,254), and received a "very positive rating" across more than 27,000.

The acclaim, however, is not universal. Steam reviews often mention a short campaign, not-so-great AI, lack of ultrawide-support, the use of Epic Online Services for crossplay with Epic, and, of course, problems with online servers. Redditor Ixziga noted that racking up over 200,000 concurrents during a North American working day, on a Monday no less, is no small feat.

This is also a bit of a rebound for Space Marine 2, whose user rating was "mixed", as recorded by SteamDB via the Wayback Machine, when the first advanced access period went live on September 5th.

According to Eurogamer these early negative reviews were primarily prompted by the Epic Online Services (EOS) installation. This sparked a small review bombing campaign. Not enough to have a lasting impact, but enough to prompt a response from publisher Focus Entertainment. The EOS client was "implemented to support optional cross play between Steam and Epic Players and to synchronize friends lists between the two store" and that linking accounts is completely optional.

Space Marine 2 also has a good Metacritic score, with an aggregate review score of 83%. In our review, we weren't as enthusiastic, finding that the impressive spectacle wore off a bit too quickly. However, developer Saber Interactive’s "deep love" of the Warhammer 40,000 settings is "clearly sincere."

The players are also noticing this commitment, and I am not just talking about the WH40K veterans.

Space Marine 2 is off to a great start, but there's still a lot more to come. Focus and Saber are planning four seasons of paid cosmetics, as well as free gameplay updates, including new weapons, maps, and enemies. They're also adding a horde-mode. This last one is a bit puzzling. By its nature, a small band bipedal tanks facing off against literal hordes xenos, you'd expect a horde-mode to be included right from the start. It's instead planned to go live sometime in mid-2025, or the fourth season. Perhaps it's a ploy to get players to come back after they have grown bored and moved onto other things? If so, it's a great idea. But it still seems strange to me.

Space Marine 2 will be releasing its first update later this week. It includes multiple fixes for crashes and improvements to address CPU overheating issues, server issues, as well as render bugs.