Konami's new Yu-Gi-Oh Master Duel has surpassed 250,000 unique players online at the same time!
According to data taken directly from Steam, and displayed by SteamDB, Master Duel has hit the top 4 globally on the platform, only being beat by Valve's own Counter-Strike Global Offensive, DotA 2, and KRAFTON's PUBG: Battlegrounds.
Master Duels concurrent player count since launch. Peak is 255,207 players.
This is quite a successful launch for the title which brings in over 20 Years of Yu-Gi-Oh goodness into one singular, modern title that is available cross platform - so these numbers are certainly much higher.
How Are the Reviews Doing?
So far, we've seen 8,117 reviews on Steam for Master Duel, with 6,004 of those reviews being marked as positive. That's a 73.96% positive review rate!
Interesting fact: 9 reviewers so far have over 40 hours in the game. Is it that good or are they idling?
That's not to say all positive reviews are truly positive - though Steam reviews usually have a bit of joking around in them. There has been some frustration when players are able to pull off long combinations of cards which forces you to sit idle, which Shin Ryujin calls out in their review.
Quote From Shin Ryujin If you are willing to spend half of your lifetime waiting for your opponent to finish a combo that summons a monster that ends the game in 1 attack, then this game is for you.
Though Tropic swoops on in and shows that the previous iteration of a Yu-Gi-Oh game, Duel Links, has now been replaced by Master Duel for them.
Quote From Tropic Uninstalled Duel Links
Xiroc.C.A.P gave a more in-depth review citing it as being the best video game works of Yu-Gi-Oh in recent years and remains optimistic even if new players learning the rules is quite an undertaking.
Quote From Xiroc.C.A.P 8/10As a Duel Links former player and a fan of the Yu-Gi-Oh card game, I came to the following conclusion after a brief experience. I hope my opinion helps those who are still on the sidelines.It can be said that this game is one of the best video game works of Yu-Gi-Oh's physical card in recent years. Unlike Duel Links, which focuses on fast-paced combat and nostalgia for anime plots, just like its name, the game's duel rules are the orthodox ocg-rules, which can be said to be one of the most complicated rules in card games. A large number of cards, a wide variety of rules, all flowers are in bloom decks, unexpected situations, and reversal of life after death, are the biggest charms of Yu-Gi-Oh.
At present, the music, scene design, and animation effects of the game are still quite satisfactory. At the same time, new players can build their own deck at a very low cost, which is crucial to the player experience for a card game. The only shortcoming at present is that the cost of building a second deck after building the first deck is relatively high (except for some general-purpose cards). The characteristics of the game are also doomed to the existence of tiered decks. At present, the dominance of mainstream decks over the environment is still unshakable. Let us look forward to how Konami will coordinate and balance in the future.
Overall, I'm still optimistic about this game right now. For those new players, the learning cost of ocg-rules is too high, and new players may need a long transition period, and the Duel Link is still suitable for players who like Yu-Gi-Oh's animation and want to have a simple duel.
Beating Artifact
Artifact, which was officially considered a dead game by Valve a little less than a year ago, never saw the success that Master Duel has. Peaking very briefly at 60,646 Concurrent players on launch, a quarter of what Master Duel has accomplished in the less than 4 days it has been active, Artifact never saw much play at all.
Don't mind the high Twitch viewer counts - that's just people streaming movies and television shows in the category since Twitch won't do anything until they receive a DMCA takedown request.
Other Card Games vs Yu-Gi-Oh Master Duel
GWENT: The Witcher Card Game which saw its release back in 2017, though only recently joining Steam in 2020, capped out at 7,504 concurrent players on Steam. It should be noted though you can also play this game through the GoG Galaxy Launcher, so numbers aren't very accurate but they still tell the story that GWENT has never been very large.
A peak into not much else.
Mythgard which launched towards the end of 2019 peaked at 490 concurrent players. It goes to show how difficult it can be to break into the space - though Yu-Gi-Oh certainly has those years of existence to power interest by players of the past and present. Rhino Games ultimate went into maintenance mode with the game and then passed it off onto Monumental just over 3 months ago.
The interest from Twitch never drove game downloads.
Shadowverse's past 5 years on Steam shows a different story. A dedicated playerbase that, much like Hearthstone, sees players return for content updates in peaks and then settling back into comfort. It has seen a peak of 24,167 players, which happened 5 years ago.
Yu-Gi-Oh Duel Links hit a peak of 21,520. That was in the lead-up to Master Duel happening 4 months ago.
It's safe to say that Yu-Gi-Oh is rocking the genre right now.
If you want to check out Yu-Gi-Oh Master Duel, it is available to play right now on Steam, Xbox, PlayStation, and Switch for free! iOS and Android apps are coming at a later date.
Have you been playing Yu-Gi-Oh Master Duel? What are your thoughts on the game?
Comments
It's been 10 years since the last online multiplayer Yu-Gi-Oh pvp game, Yu-Gi-Oh Online (2004-2012) was the last one. That game allowed players to trade digital cards and it had single elimination tournaments with up to 512 players. One could say that was the golden era of Yu-Gi-Oh. The game shutdown with 4 million players. It was shutdown because it competed with the real life paper card game as people were able to sell digital cards on eBay. Hence, Duel Links was created as a Speed Duel simulator which allowed Konami to profit from both the digital card game and the real life card game.
Now, we are in 2022, Master Duel has been released, but it is not an accurate reflection of the real card game. There are several problems:
1. No side deck - Every game is a best out of 1 (bo1). This is likely due to the fact that the average duration of a duel is about 30 mins. Even if bo3 was added, duels could take over 1 hour which would not be fun nor good for the ranking algorithm.
2. Custom banlist - The banlist used in Master Duel is neither the OCG or the TCG one. The card pool is also different. This is also likely that more banlists divides the playerbase and the queue. Having one queue pools all the players into the ranking. However, by doing it this way, they are not competing with the real life card game.
3. Gameplay speed - While the animations and graphics are up to modern standards, it has severely impacted the game speed. Yu-Gi-Oh is a card game that requires several different cards in sequence to reach a end game state. Fan-made simulators like YGO Omega have been able to balance the animations with the game speed. This is done because summon animations in YGO Omega are async (asynchronous) which mean that there is no delay or pause during the animations. The animations don't pause the timer nor cover the entire screen. In Master Duel, the animations cannot be disabled from Settings. There is one setting for disabling Special Summons, but this only stops a portion of the animation. Then there is just the animation of placing cards on the field itself. Master Duel also has added several confirmation clicks for each card. Normally, a single click is for selection and then a final click to confirm. However, in Master Duel, each individual click on a card requires its own confirmation. This leads to double the clicks. It has reduced misclicks but created a UI where the user may find fighting to use over the long run.
4. Alternate formats - The game is not just missing several cards, but also several formats. In fan-made sims, one can create a game to play any format. This appeals to all players, both casual and competitive. Currently, a player is forced to play competitive only in Master Duel.
There are however many good points:
1. Graphics - The animations for summons and attacks are beautiful.
2. Card crafting - This has surpassed even MTG (Magic the Gathering) Arena's way of acquiring cards. Most players can hop in and finish the solo mode to get sufficient gems to craft any 40-card deck.
3. Music - I think they hired an orchestra for this. It's truly magnificent.
4. Best official simulator for Yu-Gi-Oh - This has single handedly killed most of the other games like Duel Links and even the real life card game. During the pandemic, players now have an official way to play Yu-Gi-Oh online.
5. Solo mode - It's easy for players that are new to Yu-Gi-Oh or returning to use the solo mode to learn the rules. Only Konami could have made a proper tutorial mode with lore.
Overall, this was needed for Yu-Gi-Oh to grow. Games like Hearthstone have been around for a long time and are doing better than Yu-Gi-Oh, which has been around since 1998. The growth of any game requires the number of new incoming players to be higher than the outgoing players. This will bring many players to the game.
Started playing this game yesterday and greatly appreciated the tutorial coz my memory of the yugioh rules were pretty rusty 😅 Vaguely remember playing the RL TCG in school and watching the anime. So far I'm pleasantly enjoying the experience and wow, when I went to the collection manager, I had no idea there were like over 9000 cards 😜 Guess this game is 23 years old after all
So far, it pleasantly surprised me.
I thought it was just going to be a quick crash grab knowing Konami, but the economy is actually quite friendly. I was able to make an acceptable Sky Striker deck (Without 3 of the UR Staples like Ash Blossom and Maxx C) like 2 hours after opening the game and still have a lot of currency to work with. It's probably front loaded though and it's going to feel like a pain later.
But who knows, Konami can pull the plug anytime they want but I'm gonna stick with this for a while until the next Hearthstone miniset comes out.
Are you guys gonna cover Duels Master as well? like you did with Runeterra?
im liking the game very much, but beware its not as f2p as it may initially seem.
Honestly, the best thing in this game, if you ask me, is the economy.
There is only 1 currency shared between both transaction purchases and in game rewards, so you aren't left in a state of "Oh I only need X in game currency to buy Y thing I want right now, damn, better buy Z amount of [INSERT PREMIUM CURRENCY] here buy it, which is gonna cost me $24.99", you just buy the small amount you might need.
For the introduction of the game, at the very least when I started playing it, they have 3 1-time-purchase bundles that give you 10 packs + a heavily played stable cards, for less gems (Ingame currency) than the regular price of buying 10 packs - and on top of that there are some pretty good deals for if you DO want to buy some currency to kickstart your collection, that you can buy 3 times giving you a decent amount of gems at a heavy, HEAVY discount.
There's also the system where you can unlock the various "secret" packs that have a much smaller cardpool to pull from, so if you want cards from a particular archetype you want to try, you can just buy those packs and get a pretty decent chance of pulling some of the cards you want/need.
Unlock MTG Arena there is also a bloody dust/craft system, with each rarity having its own crafting currency. Dust 3 of a given rarity and you can craft 1 of that rarity that you want.
This is my first time playing Yu-Gi-Oh since I was a little kid and there was a craze about it in the public school days where no one ACTUALLY knew how to play the game right. Watched a bit of content from various dedicated creators, learned a bit about the mechanics/stables/meta. Found a deck I liked, crafted the core of it day 1 without spending a dime. Good fun
I think this game just got released and right now has the best economy in all of the TCG in the market BY FAR. It's insane how much resources you generate (although that could be a business decision given the release).
The 1 card = 3 cards of the same rarity is pretty healthy and reasonable. Most of the games have a ratio of at least 4. And the required resources for generating each card is very low (only 30) so it's quite easy to accumulate enough points from the rewards you get by the rewards track (don't know how it's called)
Regarding yugi mechanics. I believe that since they don't seem to like the idea of adding a Mulligan, they really should print better draw options for control decks, and limit a little bit how much agro decks can cycle. Some matches feel like if you had a bad hand, you lost at turn 1 or 2. No skill cap there, just RNG.
I like it. Going to stick with it for a long time. I ended up downloading it like two days ago, and had a viable deck to play withing the first hour or two of me playing the game. I imagine the rewards are very front loaded, but so far it feels much more generous then HS. Though, the more digital TCGs I play, the more I appreciate HS's UI. Master Duel's UI feels very poor compared to HS (shop screen, deck builder, selecting cards, etc).
If only this new iteration had a good PVE campaign.. :/ unfortunately, it has just some semi-random bot fights without a particular story..
I disagree. The solo stuff has been pretty fun so far, and it's interesting learning about the different deck archetypes.