Steam users have already declared the winner in the great coaster sim war

It's early days in the great coaster sim war, but already it looks like we have a clear winner.

This week, Atari's RollerCoaster Tycoon World came out on Steam - a day before Frontier's Planet Coaster launched, also on Valve's digital platform.

Reviews for both games are in the works at Eurogamer, but I thought it would be interesting to see how the two rivals were doing in terms of Steam user reception.

Let's start with RollerCoaster Tycoon World, which came out on 16th November. Well, in short, it's been something of a disaster.

Overall, user reviews for RCTW are mostly negative. That means just 32 per cent of the 1810 reviews are positive.

Digging into the user reviews, there are complaints about the game's graphics, performance and feature set. I struggled to find anything positive about the game, with most pointing to Planet Coaster instead. Below is the "most helpful" user review of RCTW, the one that appears at the top by default when you visit its Steam page.

Perhaps the reception shouldn't come as any surprise: Atari's clearly struggled with RCTW, switching developers a number of times as it's battled negative feedback to alphas, betas and a Steam Early Access build.

Now onto Planet Coaster, which came out on 17th November. Well, it's off to a flyer. Overall, user reviews are overwhelmingly positive, with an impressive 95 per cent of of the 1310 reviews marked as positive.

Most of the praise is unanimous in saying Planet Coaster feels like the spiritual successor to the RollerCoaster Tycoon series, which has had a tough time of it for a number of years now. Below is the "most helpful" Steam user review of Planet Coaster.

Let's have a look at player numbers. RollerCoaster Tycoon World does not register on Steam's top 100 games by concurrent player count, which means at the time of publication, it had fewer than 1488 players.

Planet Coaster, however, had 6500 players at the time of publication, with a peak today of just shy of 17,000 players.

What's clear is that Steam users have already had their say, and declared Planet Coaster the victor. Can Atari turn RollerCoaster Tycoon World around? The company's recent reputation suggests players shouldn't hold their breath. We'll see.

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