“With the Plains of Eidolon expansion, Warframe hit an all-time peak of 121,377 concurrent players on Steam, nearly double its previous record of 69,526 CCU peak in March 2017 with Octavia’s Anthem, making it the second highest peak CCU for a free-to-play game currently on Steam. Warframe Plains of Eidolon rocketed to the top five of SteamCharts, racking up 40,145,054 hours played (as of this writing) by enthusiastic Tenno.”
The update hasn’t even landed on console yet, so that number will only go up, even if all we can see is the Steam stats, which Digital Extremes notes puts the game in second place for playtime in F2P games (that’s still accurate as of this morning). Interestingly, the press release says the game still counts “more than 30 million registered users,” not that far off from the almost 31 million registered users counted in March of this year, which at the time was an increase of five million players since 2016.
All of that is to suggest Plains of Eidolon has brought back existing users rather than heavily widening its base, which may or may not surprise you; the expansion is notable for its MMORPG aspirations, with the addition of open-world landscapes, a focus on its storyline, and an emphasis on exploration.