Dragon Ball: Sparking! ZERO peaks at over 91k CCU on Steam: how it compares to other fighting games
Dragon Ball: Sparking! ZERO has launched in Advanced Access, showing impressive numbers on Steam. Let’s take a look at its CCU count and compare it to other titles, including those in the similar genre.
On October 8, Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero became available to players who purchased the Deluxe or Ultimate edition. Strong pre-orders also helped the game become the highest-grossing premium product on Steam over the past seven days.
Sparking! Zero currently has a “Very Positive” rating on the platform, with 94% of the 7.6k user reviews being positive.
Shortly after its Advanced Access launch, Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero peaked at 91,005 concurrent players (via SteamDB). This makes it one of the biggest new releases on Steam this year by peak CCU.
The game, developed by Spike Chunsoft and published by Bandai Namco, ranks below Chained Together (94.4k CCU) and Hades II (103.5k CCU), but above the likes of Ghost of Tsushima (77.1k CCU) and Gray Zone Warfare (72.5k CCU).
It is worth noting that Sparking! Zero is likely to increase its concurrent player count once it launches for everyone on October 11. The game is also available on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S, but there are no publicly available tools to check its metrics on those platforms.
How does Sparking! ZERO’s CCU count compare to other games?
Before we get to the point, let’s have some boring discussion about the genre classification. Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero is the fourth installment in the Budokai Tenkaichi series, which were 3D fighting games during the PS2 era. While they all are very different from titles like Tekken, Mortal Kombat, or Street Fighter, they still had fighting mechanics at the forefront of the core gameplay.
There are also other Dragon Ball games that mix fighting with genres such as RPG and action-adventure (see Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot). We don’t want to go into that territory here, especially given the blurriness of genre classifications, but one thing is clear — Sparking! Zero already has the highest concurrent player count of any other premium fighting title on Steam.
The top 10 can be seen below*:
*Note: There are plenty of other games on the platform with the “Fighting” tag, from Naraka: Bladepoint to For Honor, but we didn’t include them on the list. We also excluded other Dragon Ball titles to compare them separately.
- MultiVersus (free-to-play) — 153.4k CCU
- Dragon Ball: Sparking! ZERO — 91k CCU
- Street Fighter 6 — 70.5k CCU
- Tekken 8 — 49.9k CCU
- Mortal Kombat 1 — 38.1k CCU
- Mortal Kombat 11 — 35.1k CCU
- Brawlhalla (free-to-play) — 34.8k CCU
- Guilty Gear -Strive- — 31.1k CCU
- Tekken 7 — 18.9k CCU
- Mortal Kombat X — 15.7k CCU
Sparking! Zero also ranks 1st in peak CCU among other Dragon Ball games on Steam, above the likes of FighterZ (44.3k CCU), Kakarot (25.8k CCU), Xenoverse (22.8k CCU), and Xenoverse 2 (19.4k CCU). Looking at Bandai Namco-published titles, Sparking! Zero is behind only Dark Souls III (129.9k CCU) and Elden Ring (953.4k CCU).
