Persona 4 Golden released for PC via Steam on June 13, 2020, and the game has already reached a milestone of 500,000 players.
Here’s the announcement tweet from Atlus, along with an original illustration by Shigenori Soejima to commemorate the occasion:
We’re excited to announce that Persona 4 Golden has hit 500,000 players on PC! Thank you for all your support!
Character Designer Shigenori Soejima created this original sketch to celebrate. We hope you’re enjoying #P4G and welcome back to the Midnight Channel! pic.twitter.com/SlYBINYedY
— Official ATLUS West (@Atlus_West) July 11, 2020
To put this in perspective, Persona 4 Golden has sold more on PC in a single month than it did on PlayStation Vita in Japan over the course of several years. Last known retail sales for Persona 4 Golden in Japan put it at around 324,000 units according to Game Data Library, which records sales data released by Famitsu.
Ports of the Persona games to platforms outside of PlayStation have been a long time coming. Atlus first began gauging interest for Persona games on PC and Nintendo Switch through its annual consumer survey in 2018. After no PC or Switch versions of the Persona RPGs materialized over the next two years, Atlus’ 2020 survey saw a record number of participants and had to be closed early, with the company thanking fans for their input. A week later, the hashtag #BreakFreePersona began trending on Twitter, with fans asking Atlus to port Persona 5, Persona 4, and Persona 3 to the Nintendo Switch.
As of this report, none of these games have been announced for the Switch, but Atlus has released Switch ports of Catherine: Full Body, which was developed by the company’s Persona team, and Persona 5 Scramble, an action-RPG sequel to Persona 5. Despite the fact that the original Persona 5 was never released on the Switch, Persona 5 Scramble saw nearly 30% of its sales on the platform in Japan at launch.
When Persona 4 Golden first released on Steam last month, it was only a matter of time for the hit RPG to reach an impressive 29,984 concurrent players at its peak the following day on June 14, 2020. At the time, over 50% of all players have already gotten their first Persona, Izanagi. Additionally, 20% of them had already saved Yukiko. Since then, the game has been doing quite well for itself and has been a staple on Steam’s top sellers’ list. We also learned that Atlus directed the new port of Persona 4 Golden. This is a bit of a rarity, as the original team or studio isn’t often involved in the development of ports. You can read more about that here.
Food for thought:
Technically, Atlus has been aware of the demand for Persona games on more platforms since 2013. Persona Q was developed after Atlus heard from a number of fans that they wanted to see a Persona game on the Nintendo 3DS.
Persona 4 Golden is currently available for the PlayStation Vita and PC via Steam.
