Kuro Games is betting on Steam to revive Wuthering Waves’ player base. A year after launch, daily active s are still going down
Keeping a free-to-play game going for the long run is tough, and WuWa is no exception. The Steam launch will help for sure, but it won’t last forever.
Wuthering Waves launched about a year ago, and as a free RPG, it absolutely blew up hitting 30 million s in just three weeks. I don’t usually get into this type of game, but WuWa really pulled me in for a while, way more than I expected. Now it’s finally making its way to Steam, but this might not be a good sign.
Wuthering Waves shows how to do free-to-play right
Wuthering Waves came out in May 2024 and is available on PC (via Epic Games Store and its own launcher), Android, iOS, and since January 2025, it’s also on PlayStation5. It might seem like your typical open-world RPG with a gacha system, but it’s surprisingly free-to-play friendly – kind of like Sword of Convallaria. You really don’t need to spend any money to have a blast, unless you're trying to unlock all the Resonators super fast.
Source: Wuthering Waves; Developer: Kuro Games
The game got a decent score from critics, but players definitely seem to enjoy it way more. The latest reviews say:
This game becoming better with every update.
It’s fine “Genshin clone.” The game evolves the base Genshin formula with more involved combat and a different philosophy on traversal/exploration.
- Kron
AAA Game, Gacha 2ND
- ARCHER
And I couldn’t agree more. The exploration in WuWa is just really fun. Sure, it can feel a bit repetitive at times, but there’s always something to do. The world is so huge, packed with puzzles and side activities, you’ll never get bored. It's like those best RPGs where you think you’re just heading from point A to point B, but then you end up getting distracted by so many things along the way that you forget what the main quest even was – but in a good way.
Kuro Games brings WuWa to Steam to keep it alive
The fact that Wuthering Waves is launching on Steam on April 28 might be a sign that it's starting to lose players, and Kuro Games is doing whatever they can to get some attention back. Updates and new characters don’t seem to be cutting it, and according to MMO Population, daily active s are still dropping.
Source: MMO Population
Even though the player base has grown a bit over the last few months and the numbers are still pretty strong, just over 100,000 peak daily players isn’t really enough for a live-service game like this. It’s the usual pattern: you get a huge wave of hype at launch, but then things settle down and only the real fans stick around. Bringing the game to Steam is obviously an attempt to widen the audience again. It'll definitely bring in new players, but it might just be a short-term boost.
That said, if you’re still playing WuWa, don’t stress, it’s not going anywhere anytime soon. It's a solid game, and as long as the devs keep at it, it'll stick around for long.
