Hazelight’s follow-up to It Takes Two has hit record highs for the studio, as the amount of Chinese-speaking players rockets on Steam.
It Takes Two became a breakout hit for Hazelight Studios with almost 23 million copies sold and several Game Of The Year awards, and it seems like the developer has another winner on its hands with its successor Split Fiction.
Following its launch on Thursday, the co-op action game has already hit a concurrent player peak of 197,434 on Steam. That’s almost triple the size of It Takes Two’s peak on the platform (71,039) and an incredible leap ahead of the studio’s first game, A Way Out (8,582).
At the time of writing, Split Fiction is the eighth most played game on Steam, ahead of GTA 5 and Apex Legends, and just behind Marvel Rivals. The game’s player numbers will likely only increase over the weekend, and a key reason for its success might be down to China.
Hazelight Studios founder Josef Fares has previously said half of It Takes Two’s 23 million sales were from China and a new Steam Hardware and Software Survey has revealed a significant uptick in Chinese-speaking users on the platform over the past month.
According to the survey, February 2025 saw a 20.88% increase in Simplified Chinese-speaking users on Steam, with the group making up 50.06% of the entire userbase. English is second with 23.79% (down 10.18%), while Russian is third with 6.76% (down 2.86%).
It’s unclear what has caused this surge over the past month. As reported by Automaton, the Chinese New Year holidays usually cause a spike in Chinese-speaking players, but this surge in February last year was much smaller at 7.26%.
The only other discernible cause is the beta for Chinese-developed game Mecha Break, which hit over 300,000 concurrent players shortly after it launched on February 23. Marvel Rivals, developed by China’s NetEase games, also continues to be popular, hitting a 242,904 concurrent player peak on Steam in the past 24 hours.
Monster Hunter Wilds may have boosted these numbers too, through its beta earlier in the month, before its full launch on February 28. Capcom’s juggernaut is currently the second most played game on Steam, with a 24 hour peak of 961,406.
Simplified Chinese has been the biggest language on Steam several times in the past, with reports stemming back to 2018 and 2020, so it isn’t a new phenomena. It’s regularly been close with English too over the years, and considering China has a huge population of over 1.4 billion, that isn’t entirely surprising.
The big change here might be the games industry in China itself. While mobile games like Honor Of Kings and PUBG Mobile have been popular in the country for years, last year’s Black Myth: Wukong marked a significant sea change as a AAA Chinese-developed single-player title across PlayStation 5 and PC, and it became a huge success.
As noted in our interview with Mecha Break producer Kris Kwok, it seems studios in China are turning towards consoles and PC because the mobile market has hit a ‘bottleneck’, with the success of Black Myth: Wukong proving these kind of games can be a huge success.
It seems China generally is approving more games too. According to the South China Morning Post, China approved 1,416 video game licences in 2024, the highest since 2019. This is split between 1,306 domestic games and 110 foreign titles.
While it remains to be seen if the games industry in China will continue to expand and grow, it seems inevitable that it will begin to have an increasingly large influence on the plans of Western and Japanese publishers in the future.
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