Would-be Sims competitor Inzoi’s publisher says Steam concurrents aren’t as important as sales, which is only technically correct

Meant to be a direct competitor to the woefully under-staffed life sim genre—specifically, the Sims-like part of it—Inzoi’s a bit of a strange beast. While it landed to some solid sales figures, over a million in a week, and is enjoying a “mostly positive” overall review score on Steam, it’s also experienced a pretty sharp dropoff in players.

Speaking with IGN about these numbers earlier this week, Krafton responded: “Inzoi continues to steadily generate sales, and as a singleplayer game, it would be most appropriate to refer to the additional sales count at each major update point as opposed to concurrent player count on Steam in measuring the game’s performance.”

For context, Inzoi’s current 24-hour peak (per SteamDB) is 2,761 players at the time of writing—compared to its all-time peak of 87,377 players, that’s a pretty steep decline from launch day. What’s more, recent reviews are standing at “mixed”. Having a gander at these reviews, most negative opinions boil down to ‘looks pretty, lacking depth’. Opinions on the game’s subreddit bang a similar drum.

Which I suppose is fair enough for a game that’s in early access, and—look: I, too, don’t think Steam concurrents are the be-all and end-all of a game’s success. I’m generally exhausted whenever some punter takes to the town square and clangs a handbell decrying ‘hear ye, hear ye! This game is dead!’ just because 10,000 people are playing it, rather than half a million. Krafton is technically correct.

However, the context is inescapable here. Inzoi is trying to go blow-for-blow with one of the big boys of gaming, and while I’m just as sick as anyone else about EA’s $1200 deluge of DLCs, it’s important to see how it’s matching up against its direct competition. The answer is that it’s getting shoved in a locker.

The Sims 4, a 10-year old game that only came to Steam five years ago, has nearly 19,000 people playing it on the platform as I write this very sentence, with a 24-hour peak of 31,000. Things look even more dire for Inzoi when you consider that Inzoi just released an update. That 2,761 figure is actually a bump in numbers. For most of June, Inzoi’s been struggling to break 2,000.

I certainly wouldn’t expect Inzoi to be on The Sims 4’s heels or anything. That’d be like expecting an MMO released in the 2010s to peel significant numbers off World of Warcraft. But The Sims 4 has more than 10x Inzoi’s players on Steam alone—and while you can only get Inzoi through Steam, there are a lot of Epic Games Store players for The Sims that aren’t accounted for in these numbers, given it took half a decade for The Sims 4 to come to Steam.

In other words, for an early-access life sim? Inzoi’s probably doing fine. As a direct competitor to The Sims? It’s being thrashed, and it’s not even close. I genuinely wish the best for Inzoi—in a David vs Goliath matchup, I’m rootin’ for David—but while concurrents aren’t everything, they aren’t nothing, either.