If you’ve paid attention to the concurrency numbers that Bless Unleashed is doing on SteamDB, you might be wondering how a game that largely gets a shrug from most MMO fans around these parts is doing such gangbuster numbers – nearly 70K in the last 24-hour peak as of this story’s writing. A video by YouTuber KiraTV may have an explanation: It’s because the game is doing very well in China.
Kira discovered this by logging in to the game near the peak times for each region — around 9:00 a.m. EDT for China, 4:00 p.m. EDT for NA/EU players, which incidentally appears to account for the peaks and valleys seen on SteamDB’s charts — to get a gauge of how busy each region’s servers are. This can be done from Bless Unleashed’s launcher, which has a drop-down menu to select which region to connect to.
According to Kira’s findings, servers in other regions were riding at average to low (EU, Japan, and Korea’s single servers were at average, NA was at low but was checked off-peak), while the Asia regions section, which has four Chinese servers and one Southeast Asia server, were either at average or crowded. Kira then checked back during EU peak times and found those same servers to be on the low end.
In the US morning on the weekend as I type this, I tried to replicate Kira’s results, and sure enough, my check of the Asia region found the Chinese servers to be very active indeed in their prime time:
Kira’s video includes a bit more context on why these numbers appear to be falling the way they do, citing the Bless franchise’s penchant for shutting down in other parts of the world while Chinese players were yet to experience the IP until Unleashed. He further points out that even for Chinese fans, the game still has a near 50/50 split of Steam user opinion, which does appear to be the case if you switch the language settings of Steam reviews. That all said, it would seem that after trying and failing with other games in other areas of the globe, Bless Unleashed has found its audience, assuming the Chinese player population is held long-term.
As of Monday morning, Round 8 Studio says it’s renaming the servers on August 25th to “create a more immersive gameplay experience.” North America will become Physera, Europe will become Teleos, and the Southeast Asia server will become Kuat Ran. The Chinese servers were not mentioned.
