We can all be adults and admit when our more ‘doom and gloom’ forecasts aren’t as on the nose as we like; Rocket League is doing impressively well, with a massive resurgence on Steam included, in monumental numbers of their first day as a free-to-play title that was kicked off by Epic Games purchasing Psyonix.
In the first day, they climbed well-past 1,000,000 players online at once as everyone stumbled through aerials and bumped each other with reckless abandon across all four platforms: Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo Switch, and PC.
Rocket League has now hit one million concurrent players for the first time ever after going F2P. RL going hard
— Rod Breslau (@Slasher) September 24, 2020
The furor raised by PC players on needing to link their Steam accounts into an Epic account (which Pysonix offered to do with mostly blank information) was short-lived, it appears, as even Steam numbers offered the highest peak that the title has had in its five years of existence on the PC gaming platform.
As big as Rocket League has been, Psyonix has appeared to silence its critics with ease; it’s going to get even bigger in the future as the esport scene grows well beyond what it has been in the past.
This provides an interesting caveat to the esports scene in general, linked with titles that have gone free-to-play: they tend to simply offer a far larger userbase without forcing fans to pony up money upfront and making up that lack of a price tag in the latter half with microtransactions and various monetization schemes.
Which means as annoyed as you are that Psyonix neutered their inventory to befuddle those attempting to trade-up cosmetics into the next tier, and offering a wantonly overpriced blueprint scheme in its stead, it’s going to be paying the bills for the future.
Much as Fortnite has done in the past with success.
Even if that monetization rings in at $20 per cosmetic.
This combined with Epic’s (alleged) decision to remove Mac and Linux support, along with resetting the XP grind for everyone, still offers a few sour notes for veterans of the title that won’t be entirely pleased with how Rocket League is forming up for the future. Further, the free to play setting now means that lower ranks are going to be filled to the brim with smurfs (as CS:GO and Valorant are both dealing with still) that offers little headroom for new players looking to dive into the title.
If you can grit your teeth through the less enjoyable aspects, however, there lies in wait a legendary arcade-like ‘soccar’ title where fun with friends can be had aplenty.