Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga has been a rousing success for TT Games, launching to critical acclaim and praise from audiences, but it goes beyond the reviews and reception - it has smashed previous Lego records on PC with an all-time player peak of 80,000.
The second-biggest Lego game is Marvel Super Heroes with 5,953 players, then The Hobbit at 5,550, Ninjago at 5,434, and Lord of the Rings with 5,045. It has overshadowed all of them combined, putting Lego into the spotlight like never before.
It even dwarfs the second-biggest Star Wars game (as spotted by PCGamesN). Jedi: Fallen Order has a peak of 46,000 players, nearly half of Skywalker Saga. The other three that it topples are Squadrons, The Old Republic, and DICE's Battlefront 2. So not only is it a massive success for Lego but for Star Wars as a whole.
However, reaching this point wasn't without its problems. Development started in 2017 and reports circulated that there was a clash between management and employees, while a crunch culture permeated that allegedly led to employees breaking down outside work hours.
Skywalker Saga moved to a new engine, NTT, which meant that the extended development time frame did little to stop crunch, but this is a problem that has reportedly been happening at TT Games since as far back as 2005 with the first Lego Star Wars.
"The mood at [the Knutsford studio] was always rock bottom," a former employee told Polygon. "People were worn out, worked down, mentally and physically ill because of the pressure. TT always said, 'We're going to change,' but we all knew it was never gonna happen. It was always a case of, 'Just one more game, and then we do it differently.'