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Early Access zombie survival hit DayZ tops 3 million sales

Earnest Cavalli
Updated ·5 min read
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Publisher Bohemia Interactive has revealed that DayZ, the cult-hit, open-world zombie survival game, has attracted more than three million sales since its debut on Steam's Early Access platform.

DayZ arrives at this milestone only a year after reaching Early Access. Despite pragmatic warnings from DayZ creator Dean "Rocket" Hall that the Early Access version of DayZ is incomplete, the game was an immediate hit, selling over a million copies in its first month, owing largely to the cult following it attracted in its original incarnation: a modification for Bohemia's ArmA 2 first-person military sim.

"We would like to say thank you to every single one of the three million players, that have joined us on the journey of making DayZ," writes project lead David Durcak. "You all have helped make DayZ the best open world, zombie survival game. This is an amazing achievement, and we are really looking forward to start sharing with you all of our game design improvements, anti-hack solutions and other optimizations we have been working on for a majority of the last year."

[Image: Bohemia Interactive]

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3,000,000 Survivors have arrived in DayZ

Prague, Czech Republic, Friday 23rd January 2015

Just over a year ago, Bohemia Interactive released DayZ on Steam Early Access. Yesterday DayZ achieved 3,000,000 sales. This is the standalone version of the extremely popular Arma 2 modification created by Dean Hall, that has started and defined an entire genre of video gaming and inspired many other games studios.

From the beginning of the DayZ Early Access program, the DayZ team has continued to update the game on a regular basis. Since the initial release the team has released 24 updates to the main public branch of the game.

These updates have been focused on improving DayZ, and have included core redesigns of some of the most significant features including the inventory, multiplayer architecture and map improvements. As the DayZ team outlined in their development plan for 2015, there are many more large improvements in the pipeline, such as the transition to an improved anti-cheat system and multiplayer optimizations.

One of the largest changes that the DayZ team began in 2014 was to rewrite the core engine. Improving the engine will have significant long term benefits to DayZ and all of DayZ's 3,000,000 players. The name of the new engine is Enfusion. The main benefits to reinventing the core engine are in the upgrades to the renderer, as this will enhance performance for players, and also vastly improve the visual aesthetics of particle effects. In the long run these improvements to the engine will enable DayZ to utilize DirectX 11, which will further enhance the experience of console versions of DayZ. Enfusion will also bring upgraded tools for both the DayZ team and content creators, improving the efficiency of creating official content and modifications. Currently DayZ is still mostly using the Real Virtuality engine, however throughout 2015 DayZ will progressively switch to utilizing Enfusion to a greater extent.

All of these improvements have been possible due to the expansion of the DayZ team to over 80 people. This expansion allows the project to take on these greater challenges and increase the tempo of development in 2015, bringing more quality updates to DayZ's 3,000,000 players.

David Durcak the project lead of DayZ had this to say about the amazing milestone:

"We would like to say thank you to every single one of the three million players, that have joined us on the journey of making DayZ. You all have helped make DayZ the best open world, zombie survival game. This is an amazing achievement, and we are really looking forward to start sharing with you all of our game design improvements, anti-hack solutions and other optimizations we have been working on for a majority of the last year."

About DayZ
DayZ is a gritty, authentic, open-world survival horror hybrid-MMO game, in which players follow a single goal: to survive in the harsh post-apocalyptic landscape as long as they can. Players can experience powerful events and emotions arising from the ever-evolving emergent gameplay. There are no superficial tips, waypoints, built in tutorials or help given to players. Every decision matters, there are no save games, no extra lives, every mistake can be lethal. More information about DayZ is available at www.dayzgame.com.

About Bohemia Interactive
Established in 1999 in Prague, Czech Republic, Bohemia Interactive is an independent game development studio which is primarily known for its award-winning mil-sim Arma series, starting with Arma: Cold War Assault. Published in 2001, this debut title became the no. 1 bestselling PC game around the world and has won many international awards. The hugely successful series was followed by Arma 1 and Arma 2 on PC as well as Arma 2: Firing Range on mobile devices, before a standalone PC expansion Operation Arrowhead was released, as well as three DLC which greatly added to the series. The latest installment in the Arma series, Arma 3, pioneered Steam's Early Access form of development, and was successfully released in September 2013. Bohemia Interactive is also the developer of Take On Helicopters, Carrier Command: Gaea Mission and Arma Tactics – a turn-based strategy game for Android, iOS, PC, Linux and Mac. In addition to their ongoing support Arma 3 , the studio is currently working on Take On Mars and the standalone version of DayZ, which are currently both available as Early Access titles on Steam. More information about Bohemia Interactive is available at www.bistudio.com.