Square Enix wants Outriders to be its ‘next major franchise’

Outriders may have had a questionable launch but the game still went on to be a significant success. This week, Square Enix revealed that the game garnered up 3.5 million players during its launch month and it could be the publisher’s next major franchise.

This week, Square Enix finally revealed how Outriders performed at launch. During April, the game had 3.5 million unique players and on average, those players ended up putting in 30 hours of playtime each, leading to “extremely high engagement for co-operative play”.

Unfortunately, Square Enix didn’t provide a breakdown of players between platforms, but we do know that the game launched day-one on Xbox Game Pass, which likely helped a lot with reaching 3.5 million unique players at launch.

Of course, Outriders did not have the best launch, with server issues and inventory bugs. Still, Square Enix wants People Can Fly’s co-op IP to become its “next major franchise”, indicating that expansions will be on the way. People Can Fly did not plan for Outriders to be a ‘live service’ game, instead, it looks like the developers will be taking inspiration from Diablo, with a highly replayable game that brings players back over time through big expansions.

KitGuru Says: Did many of you play Outriders last month? Would you like to see some expansions down the line? 

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