Capcom2019 started with a bang when Capcom released a special “one shot” demo of the hotly anticipated Resident Evil 2 remake. Even with the restrictive 30 minute timer, the playable teaser was a huge success.
According to some juicy stats released by Capcom, a whopping 2.4 million downloaded the demo and jumped into the boots of rookie cop Leon Kennedy to explore a zombie infested Raccoon City Police Department.
CapcomCapcom revealed that 2,410,765 people in total checked the demo out. This number covers PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC, but only those who actually launched the demo and opted in for the RE Net tracking features.
It’s undoubtedly an impressive number whichever way you swing it. Unfortunately, it also looks like well over half of the players involved didn’t actually reach the “end” of the demo, with a measly 26% of players estimated to have finished it.
That leaves us with 74% of players who were either too horrified by the grisly nature of the game to push on, or simply found the half hour time limit a little too much. I personally found a 30 minute timer to be at odds with the way I play survival horror games, which is to say I usually shuffle into each room painfully slowly, hugging the walls and staying on the highest alert at all times.
It’s still worth noting that the Resident Evil 2 demo had three times more concurrent players on Steam than the Resident Evil 7 demo managed at launch, which suggests that this could be the biggest launch the franchise has ever seen.
Hopefully the completion rate will be a little higher for the full game. Of course, I imagine people are less likely to give up on a full game that they’ve paid money for. We’ll find out when Resident evil 2 launches on January 25.
Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.