About 200 new players a second at the moment in the database… what the hell….— Dean Hall (@rocket2guns) December 16, 2013
More than 88,000 new players joined DayZ within 12 hours of its Steam Early Access release.
People like zombies. Sure there are some who are tired of them along with others who’d be more than happy to see the undead subgenre put back in the ground for awhile, but by-and-large we feel confident in saying that a lot of people still really enjoy stories about walking corpses eating hapless humans.
If you want proof of that you need look no further than DayZ. The original version, a mod of Bohemia Interactive’s Arma 2, garnered a sizable fanbase with its unforgiving gameplay and survival mechanics. Now, with the standalone game’s alpha version recently released to Steam Early Access, it looks as though the game’s popularity is destined to repeat itself.
According to developers at Bohemia, the game managed to accumulate more than 88,000 players within 12 hours of its Early Access launch. Dean Hall, DayZ‘s creator would later add that some 19,000 of these new players joined within the first hour with the “number increasing by 200 a second” at one point. Included amongst those new players was apparently Cliff Bleszkinski of Gears of War fame who promptly reported finding a bug via his Twitter account. All of this said, we’re curious to see if any our readers were among these new players. Likewise, we’d love to hear how the standalone version of DayZ, albeit still in its alpha form, holds up compared to the original mod.
Source: Eurogamer
