Ace Combat 8 Triples the Series' Steam Record
Bandai Namco's flight combat game easily beat Ace Combat 7's peak on launch day, but PC buyers are complaining about crashes, performance and joystick support.
Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve, released on October 2 for PS5, Xbox and PC, is already the biggest launch in the series on Steam, the main PC game store. GamingBolt cites SteamDB, which tracks player counts, for a peak of 48,687 simultaneous players.
The previous high belonged to Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown, with 13,758 players when it came out in February 2019. The new figure is more than triple that. The count keeps moving: iXBT Games earlier cited 37,214, so the peak may keep rising.
Among Bandai Namco games on Steam, GamingBolt ranks it third, behind Armored Core VI (156,171 players) and Digimon Story: Time Stranger (84,458).
How buyers are reacting
The game's Steam page rated it "Mostly Positive" when checked: 78% of its 3,457 user reviews were favorable. GamingBolt reported 72% on September 30, so the score is climbing as days pass. The complaints center on unexpected crashes, performance and support for flight joysticks (HOTAS, the throttle-and-stick controllers flight game fans use). Critics were more generous: GamingBolt gave it 9 out of 10.
The Ace Combat team acknowledged on September 30, in a Steam announcement, that some device configuration options that existed in Ace Combat 7 are missing from the eighth game, according to Happy Gamer. For the crashes, it suggested updating graphics card drivers, freeing up disk space and checking virtual memory.
Price and PC requirements
- Price on Steam Mexico: 1,009 pesos for the standard edition and 1,299 for the Deluxe. The price on PlayStation Store and Xbox was not verified.
- Minimum requirements: Windows 11, a Core i7-10700K or Ryzen 5 3600X processor, 16 GB of memory and an RTX 2060 or RX 6600 XT graphics card.
- Protections: the Steam listing mentions Denuvo and Easy Anti-Cheat.
The studio has not given a date for a patch to fix the crashes or to restore joystick support.
