The Frostline expansion launched earlier this month and by all reports it's absolutely miserable, which is apparently what DayZ players want.
DayZ has been around a long time, first as an Arma 2 mod, then as a standalone survival game that launched into early access in 2013 with a full release in 2018. Somehow, all these years later, the player numbers keep going up: Developer Bohemia Interactive announced last week that the launch of the Frostline expansion prompted a new record for daily active users of 501,522 across all platforms.
Nearly half of those players—235,618—came from Steam, followed by 152,037 on Xbox One and 113,897 PlayStation 4. The Frostline expansion also brought in new records for peak concurrent players: 78,937 on Steam, 36,000 on Xbox, and 33,000 on PlayStation, which are less precise because unfortunately SteamDB doesn’t work on consoles.
“We’re thrilled to celebrate the first week of DayZ Frostline’s success, and we owe it all to our incredible community,” DayZ brand manager Scott Bowen said. “A heartfelt thank you to every member, from veteran survivors to fresh spawns. Your unwavering dedication and insightful feedback have been the driving force behind DayZ’s evolution, and the recent surge in player numbers is a testament to its enduring vitality. DayZ remains a competing driving force of the survival genre, pushing boundaries in every aspect that is hard to replicate.”
Bohemia said the Frostline expansion has already sold more than 300,000 copies.
It’s remarkable to see the numbers still going up on a game of this age, and I can’t decide if it illustrates why so many other studios keep taking runs at survival games (there’s gold in them there hills) or why so many of them fail (them there hills already have people on them and they’ve been there a long time). Either way, I find it interesting that Frostline is so popular because in the estimation of PC Gamer’s Jake Tucker, it is an entirely unpleasant experience: He recently described the expansion as a “miserable bundle of death and failure,” which I think he meant in a mostly-complimentary way. But that, apparently, is what DayZ players are into.
It’s worth noting, though, that it’s not as though Frostline inspired a blip on a game that was otherwise settled into cruise control: It’s been trending upward ever since it went into full release.
(Image credit: SteamDB)
Frostline clearly drove a bounce but even without that impact, DayZ’s five-year performance has been nothing short of enviable.
The ongoing success of DayZ isn’t the only big news to come out of Bohemia Interactive recently. The studio announced last week that Arma 4, the latest version of its also-long-running-and-still-doing-numbers military sim, finally has a release target—which, sorry to say, isn’t until 2027. Looks like we’re going to be playing Arma 3 for a good while yet.
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