Dauntless console launch saw 6 million players join in first week

Despite some teething issues and server queues during its console launch last week, Dauntless has been a triumph for the team at Phoenix Labs and they have the numbers to prove it.

The online action roleplaying game was officially released on May 21st and in its first seven days Dauntless has seen more than 6,000,000 new players. An incredible achievement that is no doubt due to it being completely free as well as being the first ever game to launch with cross-play across PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC. The recent partnership between Phoenix Labs and Fortnite publisher, Epic Games, no doubt had some influence on this impressive launch milestone.

Digging deeper into those stats, players have initiated 20,000,000 hunts since last week, slaying a total of 13,000,000 Behemoths while 2,000,000 slayers have been forced to retreat. Interestingly, 60% of all parties have been formed via the game’s cross-play matchmaking though it hasn’t been confirmed how many Dauntless players there are per platform.

15,000,000 of in-game time have been logged across all platforms with 25,000,000 weapons forged. The Riftstalker is currently the most deadly Behemoth among within the current Dauntless bestiary. One creatures that isn’t so terrifying is the dog you’ll find wandering around the social hub area of Ramsgate (no, not that Ramsgate) though Phoenix Labs jests that it’s been petted too many times to count.

Critics have responded well to Daunltess since launch, the game currently sitting on an OpenCritic average of 81. Many have accurately described it as a lighter counterpart to Capcom’s Monster Hunter: World, with less focus on exploration and its own, slightly toonish art style.

Comparisons to Monster Hunter are inevitable but with Dauntless being free-to-play (it features a reasonably priced battle pass) and more more approachable, it’s easy to see the two games existing in the same space, but in two separate lanes.

Dauntless has been in and out of testing for a couple of years so it’s great to see it finally out in the wild. With support from Epic and its growing community, hopefully we’ll see the game expand in fun and interesting ways in the coming months.

Source: Twitter (@PlayDauntless)

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Senior Editor bursting with lukewarm takes and useless gaming trivia. May as well surgically attach my DualSense at this point.

4 Comments

  1. I’ve really enjoyed the time I’ve spent with it.

    Gets challenging later on, progressed quite nicely. Lots to sink your teeth into.

    Good stuff.

    • Enjoying it too. Very easy to jump into and have a bash but you can approach it more tactically if you like.

  2. Are you sure about all those zeros? 6m new players killing 13m behemoths means those 6m new players must have played for less than an hour each. That’s not really much to be proud of, really.

    • Yep, pulled those numbers from the source.

      As a free-to-play game, there’s bound to be A LOT of players who download it and immediately realise it’s not for them before sinking 10 minutes into it.

      Similarly, I can see another chunk of players trying to login, get stuck in server queues, then decide they’ll come back in a week or two.

      Impressive numbers, I’d say.

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