Stellar Blade is a Hit on Steam Too
Stellar Blade is a success all over again. The action game from South Korean developer Shift Up was a hit for publisher Sony when it was released as a PlayStation 5 exclusive in April 2024. Stellar Blade got attention for its protagonist, Eve, who is depicted as a sexy woman who often wears revealing costumes. There was a dust-up when Sony censored some of Eve’s outfits in the West, but a long battle/boycott spearheaded by Mark Kern managed to remedy it somewhat, and the damper it put on Stellar Blade’s release didn’t last long. By all accounts, the game was fun, and it was such a smash that there have been discussions of a sequel, and Shift Up even became a publicly traded company. On June 11, a PC (“personal computer,” not “politically correct,” as we’ll see) version of Stellar Blade was released, and it’s off to a huge start as well; as of this writing, its peak concurrent players number on Steam is 183,830, the highest for a Sony single-player game, and that number will likely go up over the weekend when people have more free time.
The PC version of Stellar Blade is already Sony’s biggest single-player Steam launch ever. #IGNSummerOfGaming https://t.co/zAXfZgNCtg pic.twitter.com/8q90XsaUgP
— IGN (@IGN) June 12, 2025
Needless to say, games journalists are less than thrilled about its success yet again. From the start, they didn’t like Stellar Blade for the same reason many gamers wanted to check it out: the sexy outfits on Eve, including one that was essentially a nude body cover. This is something many see as sorely lacking in video games today, where the desire to be politically correct and inoffensive has resulted in more ordinary-looking women. For example, Sony’s Spider-Man turned Mary Jane Watson from a bombshell supermodel/movie star to a plainer-looking wannabe reporter and photographer (which is supposed to be Peter Parker’s job, but that’s a whole kettle of fish on its own), then managed to downgrade her looks even further in the sequel. The disastrous Concord featured a plus-size female playable character that was the butt of many jokes. There was evidence that Jean Grey was changed to look less attractive in the developing Wolverine game from Insomniac. One game artist said his female character models were fiddled with until they were no longer pretty. In a landscape like that, Stellar Blade was a breath of fresh air, unapologetically showcasing a sexy woman in the lead role, one that encouraged players to dress her up in sultry outfits. Journalists can be as pissed off as they want, but it works; Yellowflash has a nice collection of pearl-clutching takes in his video on the topic:
The success of Stellar Blade comes in sharp contrast to yesterday’s story about how games journalists are finally admitting that Dragon Age: The Veilguard crashed and burned. The talk around that game was almost exclusively about the demon monster thing that declared itself “non-binary,” with plenty of accompanying current-year political nonsense like misgendering and diversity to help make a high fantasy world more relatable to Berkley students. If your choices were that and watching Eve pose seductively as she killed alien monsters in a catsuit, which would you pick? And it’s not about sexual attraction (in most cases); I don’t imagine too many guys are attracted to an animated character. It’s more about the fun of it, the lack of inhibitions, the acknowledgment that it’s okay to embrace beauty and sexuality, and the idealized world of a fantasy. That’s why Kratos in God of War is tall and muscular, not short and skinny. There’s a lesson in this that it would behoove video game companies to learn sooner rather than later, one that could make up for the losses from games like Dragon Age: The Veilguard, Concord, and the like. Journalists will screech like banshees, but those people don’t pay the bills; it’s better to turn them off than your actual customers.
Let us know what you think of the success of Stellar Blade on Steam in the comments!
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