The free game Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel is already insanely popular

If you were shocked by the news of Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard yesterday, wait to hear this: Konami has just launched a game that players are happy with! Yu-Gi-Oh! The Master Duel was launched on consoles and PC as a free-to-play title. It’s neither the first nor the last Yu-Gi-Oh game, but it’s currently setting new popularity records.

It is not known what the interest is in the game on consoles, but on Steam, the Master Duel broke through among the five games with the most active players in the last 24 hours. The game on Steam at the time of writing is played by 155,872 players, which is more than popular games like GTA 5 and Rust. Whether this is just the initial interest in the game or Yu-Gi will remain one of the most popular titles on Steam - we'll see in a few days or weeks.

Anyway, this is a huge result for the card game right from the start. Valve’s Artifact, by comparison, was played by a maximum of 60,000 players at a time. Elder Scrolls: Legends has never been played by more than 8.8 thousand players on Steam, much like Gwent.