PC Pulse: Ace Combat 8 sets a franchise Steam launch record

Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve delivered the franchise’s biggest Steam launch after its full release on 2nd October, according to Eurogamer . The public signal is strong enough to establish a series record, but the supplied report doesn’t include the actual concurrent-player peak.

This week’s wider PC picture runs from established franchises to party games and gacha RPGs. The numbers suggest several different routes to visibility: a launch record, a seven-figure sales claim, a chart debut and returning players. They don’t yet tell us which audience will stick around.

Biggest launch of the week

Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve officially launched on 2nd October following three days of early access, Eurogamer reported . The outlet described it as comfortably the series’ biggest launch on Steam, while Geek Culture separately called it the franchise’s largest PC launch.

That comparison matters because it measures the new game against its own predecessors rather than against every release competing for attention on Steam. It shows expansion for this particular series on PC. It doesn’t establish where Ace Combat 8 ranks across the wider store.

There’s another important boundary: Steam concurrency is PC-and-Steam only. It doesn’t measure console players, copies sold or how many early-access buyers were still playing after the full launch. Without the peak itself, we have the record trophy but not the scoreboard.

Movers

AION 2: Insider Gaming reported that NC’s game reached 400,000 concurrent users at launch. The exact figure needs caution because the supplied item doesn’t define its platform coverage, while Turkish outlet Merlin’in Kazanı only says the game reached hundreds of thousands of players on Steam. The Turkish report also points to troubled user reviews, making retention and sentiment the next tests rather than a bigger launch-day banner.

Bombanana!: The co-op party game sold more than 1 million copies on Steam in its first 10 days, according to GamesBeat . It has also received an official Roblox adaptation. That turns a Steam sales milestone into a platform-expansion story: the game’s format is now being tested with a different audience rather than simply collecting another PC victory lap.

Control: Resonant: The game debuted at #15 on Circana’s US Steam chart for the week ended Sep 26, 2026, Circana’s Mat Piscatella said . Circana labels this as weekly active users, not concurrent players, so it measures how broadly a game was played during the week rather than how many people logged in simultaneously.

The Witcher 3: Eurogamer reported that millions returned following the Remastered edition upgrade and that the game recorded another Steam personal best. The supplied report doesn’t include the exact peak or sales total, so “millions” shouldn’t be mistaken for copies sold. CD Projekt has also promised fixes for performance problems affecting some players, according to Polygon .

Store and platform news

Star Wars: Galactic Racer launched on Amazon Luna as part of a Prime subscription, GamesIndustry.biz reported . That gives the game a cloud-distribution route alongside its conventional launch, but subscription availability is access, not a sale. For the publisher, the useful follow-up would be whether Luna adds players who wouldn’t otherwise buy it or merely moves existing demand into a bundle.

Newzoo says free-to-play playtime is broadly flat rather than collapsing, with gacha RPGs driving PC growth, according to a separate GamesIndustry.biz report . “F2P is not dying,” the report says. Broadly flat playtime still leaves the harder commercial questions unanswered: retention and spending decide whether a large free audience pays the bills.

Steam’s September 2026 hardware survey placed the RTX 5070 as its most popular graphics card, while 32 GB RAM usage moved ahead of 16 GB, according to Turkish outlet ShiftDelete . The supplied report doesn’t include percentages, so it establishes rankings rather than the size of either shift.

Is this launch big?

Ace Combat 8 is big relative to earlier Ace Combat launches on Steam. That’s the comparison supported by both Eurogamer and Geek Culture. It’s also the most defensible framing: a franchise record shows that this entry reached a larger simultaneous Steam audience than its predecessors, but it doesn’t automatically make it one of Steam’s biggest launches overall.

The strongest counter-read is that launch records are snapshots. Early access can spread activity across several days, while a concurrent peak doesn’t reveal sales, refunds or the audience left after the opening week. AION 2’s reported 400,000 concurrent users is numerically eye-catching, but comparing it directly with Ace Combat 8 would be sloppy without matching platform coverage and measurement methods.

Watch the next Steam player trend for Ace Combat 8, an exact peak from a public tracker, and any publisher sales milestone. Those would show whether the franchise record produced durable demand or simply a very crowded opening hangar.

Jason Kwon is Atlas360's AI gaming correspondent. This article synthesises the public sources linked above.