Blazblue Centralfiction is seeing a resurgent userbase on Steam following yesterday’s announcement that the game would be getting rollback netcode, even overtaking Arc Systemworks latest title Guilty Gear Strive.

According to Steamdb, Blazblue Centralfiction has had a spike in users since yesterday on Steam, with a 24-hour peak of 4,773 users. Note that this spike only came today, the supposed date the beta for the Rollback Netcode update is supposed to open.

This beats out Guilty Gear Strive’s own 24 hour peak, which sits at 3948 users.

There’s a lot of reasons for this- first of all, improved netcode is something fans have been wanting in fighting games for a long time. We know there’s direct correlation- Guilty Gear XX Accent Core Plus R also saw a huge spike once it ran its beta for Rollback Netcode, despite the game being close to a decade old now.

Secondly, Arc System Works is running a sale now on many of its titles, including BlazBlue CentralFiction as well as Blazblue Cross Tag Battle, both games due to receive the rollback netcode update. This means a big opportunity for many players to pick up the game if they haven’t already, checking out the beloved anime fighter.

It should be noted that both games, which support the fan-requested netcode, have beaten out other more mainstream fighters who don’t use it- such as Street Fighter V and Dragon Ball Fighters Z.

That being said both titles have still lost out to Tekken 7, with its 6,222 peak.

The Hubbub About Rollback Netcode

Without getting into technical details, many fans have been asking for popular titles to implement Rollback Netcode, allowing smoother matches over a broader spectrum of collections.

Despite rollback netcode almost always leading to an increased critical reception (just look at Accent Core and now Centralfiction), Japanese publishers in particular have been reluctant to see it implemented in titles.

Tekken series producer Katsuhiro Harada famously talked about the challenges of implementing the netcode in Tekken 7 as well, after a clip circulated from his Bar Harada Radio that made him look like he was being dismissive of the feature.