Have you heard about the release of Unknown 9: Awakening? No? Well it seems you aren’t alone. Bandai Namco’s latest endeavor into multiplatform action adventure games seems to have gone under the radar to say the least. With the game releasing with a staggeringly low 276-player peak on Steam, on a weekend no less, it looks like this game’s release is going to be a major blow for an investment from Bandai Namco.
Now, as always when we reference Steamcharts, Steam numbers don’t account for everything. Unknown 9: Awakening also released for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5, Xbox O,ne and Xbox Series X|S so we don’t have all the information on the actual total number of players playing the game across every platform. However, such a low count among the PC player base doesn’t bode well for the game.
Evidence points to Bandai Namco not really caring too much about this, the game released on last gen consoles and is being sold at a lower price tag than you’d expect from a AAA game release today at $49.99, not to mention the absolutely nonexistent marketing campaign means that the major publisher hasn’t sunk too much into this project, but a loss is still a loss, especially since Bandai opted for a relatively popular actress in Anya Chalotra to be the face model and voice actor for Unknown 9’s main character rather than the career models many other studios use.
In the wake of the hilariously disastrous launch of Concord the gaming community is looking at every new possible release to see what game will be the next multi-million dollar failure, and while Unknown 9: Awakening is almost certainly not a success, the amount of care Bandai Namco themselves put behind the marketing of this game suggests that it’s not a major investment for them. Still, sub-300 players for a new release on a weekend is below indie numbers, and this game is almost certainly a bomb.