Like A Dragon: Pirate Yakuza has found its sea legs on Steam, where it launched to the series’ second-biggest concurrent player haul to date.
A peak of 22,327 PC players played Pirate Yakuza over the weekend, according to Steam’s own stats – avast total higher than every other game in the franchise to date, save Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth.
At the same time, Steam itself broke its all-time concurrent user record once more – this time to hit 39.92 million online users. Prior to this, the record stood at 39.3 million, from back in December 2024.
While a better start than most of the (many) other Yakuza/Like A Dragon games, including 2023’s Like A Dragon: Ishin! and The Man Who Erased His Name, RGG Studio’s nautical spin-off still saw around half of the players at launch as last year’s Infinite Wealth, which peaked at 46,161 concurrent players total.
On the one hand, Pirate Yakuza is most definitely a spin-off from the main series. On the other – pirates!
“A raucous, absurd spin-off that manages to still feel like a first-rate Yakuza game despite the leftfield setting and delightfully unhinged plot,” Matt Elliot wrote in Eurogamer’s Like A Dragon: Pirate Yakuza review. “All of this somehow coalesces into something that works in defiance of itself.”
