For the first time ever, five years after its official launch, Rocket League has reached the 1 million concurrent players mark. It took only about 24 hours after Rocket League went free-to-play until the magical number was reached, which shows promise for the car football game’s future, especially considering it was reached before peak hours.
The number could potentially have been hit sooner, but as is expected of most big releases these days, the servers were not quite prepared for the sudden influx of new players. Fortunately, the issues lasted for just a few hours, and the game has been functional again since.
Rocket League keeps on going
Not often does a game reach these kinds of numbers so long after its initial release. Of course, free-to-play has everything to do with it, and the question is how many of those one million players will actually stick around. But to go from 200-300k to 1 million is quite the jump indeed. Will it keep growing, or will the majority quickly hop off the wagon again?
Either way, both Psyonix and Epic Games must be happy to see Rocket League receiving a burst of life again. While the game was chugging along just fine, it was clear that it needed something to ensure a bright future. The existing player base was growing restless at the lack of significant updates, while many potential players were simply not willing to drop $20 on a game they might not enjoy. After all, there is nothing quite like Rocket League out there.
The current update has been live for about a week now, with most of its significant new features having arrived with the F2P release yesterday. Rocket League can now be downloaded from the Epic Games Store, PlayStation Store, Nintendo eShop, and Xbox Games Store for free. They also no longer need a paid subscription to the relevant console’s online services, with Xbox being the only exception for now. Hopefully, that’ll change.
