In brief: Many of the PC ports that Sony published for formerly PlayStation 5-exclusive games struggled to gain traction on Steam, and some suffered from performance issues. Shift Up Corporation's Stellar Blade seems to have easily avoided both pitfalls, becoming an immediate hit with Steam users.
Barely a day after Stellar Blade launched on Steam and the Epic Games Store, the hack-and-slash action game has blown past all other late PC ports from PlayStation Publishing LLC, Sony's PC conversion label. SteamDB estimates that it accumulated over 180,000 players, more than the next two highest-ranked games combined.
Helldivers 2 is the only Sony-published title that technically stands far ahead, having peaked at over 450,000 players, but it benefited from launching simultaneously on PlayStation 5 and PC last year. All other Sony games came to PC long after debuting on PlayStation, sometimes years later, which clearly impacted their reception in some cases.
Stellar Blade, which launched on the console last year, quickly established a wide lead over Ghost of Tsushima's peak player count of 77,000 and God of War's 73,000. Estimated player numbers drop precipitously thereafter, including award-winning games like Returnal and The Last of Us Part II. Stellar Blade is also currently the second-best-selling game on Steam, ahead of Counter-Strike 2 and behind another new release, Dune: Awakening.
Shift Up's fast-paced action game earned praise for its combat and stylish visuals, immediately achieving an overwhelmingly positive rating on Steam from over 5,000 reviews. Players have also lauded Stellar Blade's smooth performance, achieving high frame rates on a broad spectrum of Nvidia, AMD, and even Intel hardware.
4K benchmark at optimized settings without upscaling.
The game is Steam Deck verified, and an early benchmark from Korean outlet Quasarzone suggests that the extremely modest system requirements aren't overly optimistic. With upscaling enabled on low graphics settings, the nine-year-old Nvidia GTX 1060 can attain 60 frames per second in 1080p. Maintaining that performance level in native 1080p with high or "optimized" settings requires a more powerful but still very mature 1070, or an AMD Radeon RX 6600.
More recent GPUs, such as the RTX 4070, 3080, or RX 9070, can reach 60fps in 4K without upscaling. Still, enabling FSR 4 or DLSS 4 can enable the latest high-end cards to exceed 100 or even 200fps, with or without frame generation. Those interested in benchmarking the game can download the free demo.