How Project Zomboid made 23x its normal sales numbers
gamesindustry.bizSimon Carless
Monday 24th January 2022
The GameDiscoverCo game discovery newsletter is written by 'how people find your game' expert and GameDiscoverCo founder Simon Carless, and is a regular look at how people discover and buy video games in the 2020s.
Some of you may be aware that suddenly, we're seeing a game called Project Zomboid in the Steam Top 10-grossing games of the week. In fact, it was all the way up at #4 in the Steam charts earlier this month, sandwiched between Monster Hunter Rise and the new Five Nights At Freddy's game.
You might also vaguely remember that Project Zomboid -- an isometric zombie survival game -- has been around on Steam for a long time. We believe that it's the longest-running Steam game still in Early Access, according to this list. It's been on Steam since 2013, and its first version was released all the way back in 2011!
To be clear, Project Zomboid has always been popular. It's had 40,000 Steam reviews life-to-date through the end of November. And in looking around, I was impressed with both the depth of its 'painstakingly survive the zombie apocalypse at all costs' gameplay, and the strength of its modding scene and its community-centric GaaS dev approach.
Starting in 2020, the game started surging to new heights, in part thanks to streamer support. This blog post from November 2020 reveals a new high peak concurrent user (CCU) count of over 5,000 at that time. (We recommend watching the 'Can I survive as an underweight, weak basket case?' YouTube video that helped spawn that high.) But look at the game's Steam CCU in recent weeks:
Yes, that's a 65,000 CCU high, wow! And it's with the multiplayer patch for the game -- officially released on December 20th but available in Beta earlier in
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