Phantom Blade Zero and Probably Stolen Took Over Steam the Same Week

Phantom Blade Zero key art. Image credit: S-GAME. Official share image from pbz.s-game.com; used for editorial coverage only.

Two of Steam's biggest launches this week came out about 13 hours apart, and they couldn't be much further apart in size.

At 6 a.m. Pacific on October 28, tinyBuild and Montreal's Questing Goose Studio released Probably Stolen, a $19.99 pixel-art cyberpunk pawnshop sim. That evening, at 7 p.m. Pacific, S-GAME released Phantom Blade Zero, a $59.99 Unreal Engine 5 wuxia action game starring Donnie Yen. (In Arizona, both of those times read the same as Pacific.) One install is about 1 GB. S-GAME told PC players to keep 300 GB free just to pre-load the other.

Both are doing very well.

The big one

IGN reports that Phantom Blade Zero reached a peak of 448,000 concurrent players on Steam within hours. That put it ahead of PUBG and Dota 2, with only Counter-Strike 2 drawing more people at once. It also topped Steam's best-seller chart by revenue, ahead of Modern Warfare 4, Aion 2 and Probably Stolen. The PS5 audience isn't in those numbers, because Sony doesn't publish player counts.

None of this came as a shock. IGN cites an estimate from earlier in the week that the game had sold more than a million copies before launch across Steam, PS5 and Tencent's WeGame, and that nearly two-thirds of those sales came from China, Taiwan or Hong Kong. Steam lists a Metacritic score of 88, and IGN gave it a 9/10. When Steam's own API was checked at 10:31 a.m. Arizona time on October 29, about 311,800 people were playing.

The game was supposed to come out September 9. In June, creative director and S-GAME CEO Soulframe Liang pushed it back 50 days and apologized for it. "A 50-day delay cannot solve everything," he wrote at the time. Judging by the charts, it solved enough.

For launch day, Liang posted a second letter on Steam called "Reason and Madness." It traces the game back to Rainblood: Town of Death, an RPG Maker project he made as a student, and describes the trailer that first put Phantom Blade Zero in front of a PlayStation Showcase audience: "we probably looked like a new studio being a little too bold, putting an unfinished game out for the whole world to judge."

The letter also gives a sense of the production. The team did thousands of hours of motion capture, 3D-scanned villages across China, worked with lion dance masters from Guangdong, sword masters from Mount Emei and monks from the Shaolin Temple, and choreographed fights under Donnie Yen's guidance. One line from it will be familiar to anyone who's worked in games: "Today, I have a suffocating decision to announce." Liang says that usually meant tearing apart something the team had already polished.

The letter ends with some practical notes. There's a day-one patch of about 5 GB, and S-GAME recommends rolling NVIDIA drivers back from 621.01 to 617.42 until NVIDIA ships its next update.

The small one

The smaller game spent its launch on the same charts. Its own Steam post, "200,000 Units Sold!", says Probably Stolen sold 200,000 copies in its first few hours, hit a peak of more than 86,000 concurrent players within 90 minutes, and reached No. 2 on Steam's Global Top Sellers.

Probably Stolen screenshot: a pixel-art shop counter with a wanted board, an inventory grid of guns, chemicals and food, and a customer in a red suit and hat. — Probably Stolen's counter, with the wanted board on the left. Image credit: Questing Goose Studio / tinyBuild. Official Steam store screenshot; used for editorial coverage only.

VGTimes notes that the 86,099 peak was tinyBuild's best ever. That beats Graveyard Keeper 2 at 60,000 and the original Graveyard Keeper at 46,000, which is a lot for a publisher that also puts out Hello Neighbor. Player counts kept climbing on day two: the tracker SteamPeaks recorded a peak of 112,145 on the morning of October 29, UTC.

This success was easy to see coming, too. According to tinyBuild's launch release, the game had more than 500,000 wishlists, the highest peak player count of any demo at Steam Next Fest (nearly 40,000), and over 660,000 demo players, with 98% positive reviews on the demo.

As for the game, you run a shop on the lower levels of a corrupt space station, and the rent keeps going up whether or not you had a good week. You buy goods "of questionable origin," check them for contamination, haggle, and choose whether to sell, refuse or report the customer at the counter. Some of those customers are AI-controlled people pretending to be shoppers, and the official advice from every faction on the station is "shoot on sight." The launch discount takes it to $17.99 for two weeks.

So who won the week?

Phantom Blade Zero did, by players and by revenue. Probably Stolen put up its numbers at a third of the price and well under 1% of the disk space. Both studios posted thank-you notes around launch, and both had something to thank people for.

Nothing here is shutting down, so neither game is going on our calendar. Both are worth checking on next week, once the launch crowds thin out.

Sources

Published Oct 29, 2026. Based on S-GAME's Steam posts and official site, Questing Goose Studio's Steam post and tinyBuild's launch release, the Steam store pages and Steam Web API, with IGN, VGTimes and SteamPeaks reporting. Artwork © S-GAME and Questing Goose Studio / tinyBuild; official assets used editorially only.

Phantom Blade Zero and Probably Stolen took over Steam the same week

The big one

The small one

So who won the week?

Sources

Check any Steam game.