DayZ Standalone Sells 875,000 Copies In Three Weeks

Not even a month out and DayZ's standalone “alpher” has sold more than 875,000 digital copies in three weeks time, which equates to around $18,450,000 after Valve's 30% cut. Very, very impressive. The news comes courtesy of one of Bohemia Interactive's CEO Maruk Spanel, who took to the DayZ development blog and rolled out a ton of info along with plans they have for the future of the project.

Over on the official DayZ Tumblr, Maruk writes passionately about their work on the standalone alpha of DayZ, as well the game's sales status, stating...

“We’ve received incredible support from you, DayZ users, with over 875 thousand copies of the game sold in just three weeks and thousands of useful posts and reports that already led to some notable game improvements during the holiday period with much more to come in 2014. The level of support and confidence we have received from the DayZ community makes us even more dedicated to the game than we were in the past 16 months of DayZ standalone development.”

The game launched to massive chorus of praise and excitement by the gaming community, following a long drought of info throughout the later half of 2013, where many gamers felt that the hype and excitement for the DayZ standalone would have abated by the time it did hit digital shelves. Well, there was no abated excitement by the time the game did launch on December 16th, last year.

Gamers ate up “Rocket”s game like Americans eat Big Macs, sending the game's first day sales soaring over 172,000 copies.

The game didn't launch without competition, though. The standalone of DayZ dropped during the Steam winter sale where Bohemia Interactive faced terribly stiff competition from discounted AAA titles like Skyrim, Call of Duty: Ghosts and Assassin's Creed IV. Despite facing down on the mega-heavyweights from top-tier publishers, DayZ was still, and is still, the best selling game on Steam three weeks in a row, as noted by Blues News.

However, as the chart shows, DayZ is being rivaled for the crown of the best selling indie game on Steam by none other than Gary Newman's Rust... the same designer of Gmod fame. Rust has also managed to move more than 150,000 copies in two weeks and is quickly gaining momentum as another open-world, multiplayer, zombie survival game with Minecraft-esque gameplay elements.

Gaming Blend's managing editor Pete Haas even did a breakdown on which game you might consider buying now that they're both competing for your dollar-dollar bills.

However, as Maruk noted on the DayZ Tumblr, they are focused on providing gamers with a solid gameplay experience and will improve other features of the game such as cooking, crafting, animals and hunting, as well as the implementation of ragdoll and better physics computations. The team is also working on user-created servers for the re-implementation of user-made mods, and other features that helped shape the popularity of the original DayZ mod for Arma II. I just can't wait until the vehicles make their appearance again in DayZ.

According to Maruk, DayZ won't be beta-ready until sometime late into 2014.