The Last of Us PC is a Big Disappointment, but Many Gamers Don't Mind
The PC edition of The Last of Us Part I met with quite bad reception from PC gamers, but is nevertheless achieving good activity results.
Last week saw the release of the PC version of The Last of Us Part I, a remake of one of the best exclusives ever released on Sony's consoles. Enough time has passed since the debut of the PC release to analyze it. The conclusions are not good for devs at Naughty Dog.
Mixed reception on Steam
- Currently, only 44% of player reviews on Steam praise The Last of Us Part I, which is categorized as a "mixed" reception. Such a negative reaction is due to the disastrous technical condition of the port.
- This poor result is good news for the developers, however, as immediately after the release the share of positive reviews was barely thirty-something percent.
- The reception of the game has therefore improved slightly, thanks to two small updates.
- However, 44% is still a dismal result. This is by far the worst-received PC port of a PlayStation exclusive to date. In comparison Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection, a port of an earlier Naughty Dog game, has 89% positive reviews on Steam.
- Sony's previous worst-received port has been Everybody's Gone to the Rapture with 69% positive reviews.
Gamers complain, but grit their teeth and keep playing
Poor reception of the PC version of The Last of Us Part I is due to the downright nightmarish level of port's technical condition. However, this does not prevent the game from achieving good activity results.
- The release day activity record was 36,496 concurrent users on Steam.. This is the fourth best result among Sony game ports - only Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered, Horizon: Zero Dawn and God of War did better.
- Among PlayStation games, the leader in activity scores is God of War with 73,529 players. The adventures of Kratos thus did twice as well as The Last of Us Part I.
- In turn, the record of the Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection port is a mere 10,851 players at the same time, so despite its dire technical condition TLoU1 is doing much better than the PC version of Naughty Dog's previous hit.
- What's more, not only the activity record of The Last of Us Part I, set on the day of release, is high (this could be the result of brand recognition). More surprising is the fact that after being confronted with a disastrous port, many players continue playing instead of waiting for more patches - yesterday, at the hottest moment of the day, more than 17,000 people played the title on Steam simultaneously, which is a very good result for a relatively short single player game six days after release.
The number of players combined with the slowly improving reception are good news for Naughty Dog. They show that despite the abysmal quality of the port, PC gamers are not yet ready to give up on The Last of Us Part I.
The developers promise that they will fix all the shortcomings. It remains to be hoped that they will keep their word and in the future a similar slip-up will not happen to them again.
