It seems like Redfall was released years ago, but the reality is that it came out just a few months ago, on May 1, 2023. Since then, it’s been nothing but bad news, despite Bethesda’s promises to fix everything in the future.
And the latest news that has surfaced about the ill-fated cooperative vampire hunting shooter is grim, the kind that evokes pity for what could have been… and ultimately wasn’t.
Redfall’s player base has dwindled to the point where the game’s concurrent player count on Steam regularly drops to single digits.
At times, the player count is so low that there aren’t even enough players to form a cooperative team of four.
Just one player in the entire world enjoying Redfall
Furthermore, it appears that Redfall has reached a single-player count at some point every day since September 22, as reported by VGC.
In fact, at the time of writing this, the game only has eight players, according to SteamDB. However, it’s worth noting that while these numbers paint a bleak picture, they don’t account for Xbox Game Pass players or those on Xbox Series X|S consoles.
Arkane Austin’s latest offering was poorly received by both fans and critics alike. In May, many media outlets labeled it as “one of the worst games of the year.”
Even Xbox boss Phil Spencer made it clear that Redfall had disappointed him too. Apparently, even the developers of Redfall secretly hoped that Microsoft would cancel it.
Despite everything, Bethesda Softworks’ Senior Vice President of Marketing and Public Relations, Pete Hines, has committed to not giving up on Redfall, stating, “We’re going to make it a good game. We’re always in a learning process, so that’s not new for us. We don’t like not meeting our players’ expectations.”
Fallout 76, also published by Bethesda, had an equally rocky launch before stabilizing and improving. Hines has sought to draw a comparison between the post-apocalyptic multiplayer RPG Fallout 76 and Redfall, acknowledging that the former’s launch “wasn’t flawless” and that “Redfall isn’t different for us.”
That being said, even with its launch issues, Fallout 76 still had thousands of players online at its lowest points, whereas Redfall, in comparison, appears to have become a ghost town.
