Three days after Capcom's landmark free update, Leon S. Kennedy's expanded campaign chapters and the revamped Mercenaries mode have brought players flooding back to RE:9 Requiem.
Resident Evil 9: Requiem has experienced a massive resurgence in player activity following the release of Update 2.0 on June 19. Capcom's largest free content update to date, headlined by the expanded Leon S. Kennedy campaign chapters and a revamped Mercenaries mode, has driven active player counts up by over 40% across all platforms according to community-tracked data.
Steam concurrent player counts for RE:9 Requiem have surged past 65,000 over the weekend, marking the highest peak since the game's launch month. The Leon expansion is the primary driver — the two new campaign chapters, set in a flooded underground Umbrella facility and a haunting cathedral overrun by Mold variants, have added approximately 90 minutes of gameplay and received critical praise from the community. Player reviews on Steam have shifted from "Mostly Positive" to "Very Positive" over the past 72 hours, with many returning players citing Leon's integrated storyline as the reason they reinstalled the game.
But the real competitive fire is burning in Mercenaries mode, where leaderboard records are being shattered on an hourly basis. The new tiered enemy spawning system introduced in Update 2.0 has completely rewritten the scoring meta. Veteran Mercenaries players have discovered that chaining kills across enemy wave transitions provides a 3.2x score multiplier, compared to the previous 1.5x cap. This has led to a frenzy of record-breaking runs, with the global top 10 scores changing hands more than 30 times since the update went live.
Capcom's community manager confirmed on Twitter that the new Mercenaries map — a nightmarish recreation of Raccoon City's police station — has already seen its highest score surpassed seven times in a single day. The current world record holder, Japanese player "RE_Requiem_King," posted a staggering 4,872,000 points using a Leon build optimized around the new Adaptive Knife parry mechanic. "The skill ceiling has been raised dramatically," he told us. "Update 2.0 turned Mercenaries into a whole new game. The dynamic spawn system means no two runs are ever the same."
The New Game Plus+ mode, with its dynamic enemy placement and altered item locations, has also contributed significantly to player retention. Speedrunners have already found notable optimizations — the NG+ Inferno difficulty any% world record has been pushed down to 1 hour 47 minutes, shaving 12 minutes off the previous record set in the standard campaign. A new "Requiem" difficulty tier alters boss attack patterns, forcing even veteran players to relearn encounters they thought they had mastered.
Capcom has remained tight-lipped about what comes next, but data miners have reportedly discovered references to a third major content update in the Update 2.0 files. For now, the message from the community is clear: RE:9 Requiem is enjoying a second wind, and Update 2.0 has delivered exactly what players needed. For complete campaign walkthroughs and Mercenaries strategies, check out our RE:9 Walkthrough and Characters guide.