All-Star Brawl 2 sees 34,744% Xbox player increase following Game Pass arrival

Xbox Game Pass leads to massive spike in Xbox players for Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl 2

We’ve seen some huge jumps in Xbox player numbers after games have joined Xbox Game Pass in the past, but this might be the largest leap yet. According to our data (courtesy of GameInsights), which uses a sampling of over 2.4 million Xbox accounts, Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl 2 has managed to make its debut in our Gameplay chart, slotting in at 19th this week after seeing a 34,744% increase in Xbox players hopping into the game that week. It’s an impressive climb up the chart, considering that GameMill Entertainment’s brawler was the 1,628th most-played Xbox game just the week before.

Xbox Game Pass has long been considered a fantastic tool to give games from smaller teams a boost in visibility, and Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl 2’s performance since joining Game Pass last week is a testament to that. In comparison, SteamDB suggests that for the same period (July 3 to July 8) Nickelodeon All Star Brawl 2 peaked between 70 and 90 concurrent players on Steam each day.

Interestingly, that seems to be an abnormality for the game, as its total concurrent player numbers on Steam spiked to 116 on July 3 when it launched into Xbox Game Pass, before settling into its current pattern. The week before (June 25 to July 2) shows that the game’s highest concurrent players on Steam peaked at 68, floating between 40 and 60 concurrent players daily. Perhaps players on Steam and those playing via Xbox Game Pass are making the most of the game’s cross-play feature?

Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl 2 is a Smash Bros-style brawler featuring a host of Nickelodeon characters from its biggest franchises, including Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, SpongeBob SquarePants, Jimmy Neutron, and more. Despite many of its characters being pop culture icons, it seems to have struggled to entice players when it first launched — reaching 676th in our Gameplay Chart the week after it launched on November 11, 2023.

While one of its most direct competitors, MultiVersus, was still on hiatus when Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl 2 launched, it’s also worth noting that Mortal Kombat 1 arrived in September 2023 and Tekken 6 launched in February 2024, so GameMill’s brawler was sandwiched between two fighting behemoths. However, it also has a TA community rating of 3.1/5, so maybe players haven’t gelled with it either.