Total War Pharoh Has Fewer Players Than its Predecessors From 10 Years Ago

James Cusworth / 1 year ago

The Total War series is the biggest strategy franchise ever and has held that title for about the past 20 years outshining its rivals such as the Age of Empires and Crusader Kings series so it’s pretty understandable that the series will stumble now and then. With the release of Total War Pharoh, it would seem that all is not well.

Total War Pharoh

The reviews on Steam are around 63% Positive to 37% negative which doesn’t seem so bad but compared to other total war games that have been released in the past few years like Three Kingdoms with 72% positive. This may not seem like a lot but Three Kingdoms’ all-time player count on Steam Charts is 191,816 which is so far away from Pharaoh’s measly 5,424, this shows another issue with Pharoh in that nearly nobody is playing it for a game in such a massive franchise.

At the time of writing, more people are playing Total War Rome II which came out back in September 2013 just a little over 10 years ago. TW Rome II’s 24-hour peak is also bigger than Pharaoh’s all-time peak which I think is hilarious considering the age gap in the games and the price gap with Pharaohs being just about double that of Rome II.

What’s Gone Wrong for Total War Pharoh

Total War Pharoh is rather new with it coming out on September 29th so it may still make a comeback but why has it had such a bad start? Maybe it was its release date coming out in the same month as Bethesda’s long-awaited Starfield, Pay Day 3 or Mortal Kombat 1. All these big releases coming out in the same month and players only have so much money to spend on games why would they want to spend £60 on a game that has the same experience as a game that came out 10 years ago?

This also brings up the issue of the lack of change in Total War games with the formula staying the same over the last 20 years leading to the games becoming bland and repetitive.