Success of Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 'Changes Everything,' Dev Says — and Yes, There Are Ideas for Space Marine 3

ign.com:

The success of breakout hit Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 ‘changes everything’ for developer Saber Interactive, it’s said.

Speaking exclusively to IGN as part of a sweeping post-launch interview just over two weeks after Space Marine 2’s record-breaking launch, Saber Interactive Chief Creative Officer Tim Willits said the success of the game would even positively affect its future projects.

While neither Saber nor publisher Focus Entertainment have announced a sales figure for Space Marine 2, Focus has confirmed over two million played at launch. In fact, Space Marine 2 is the most-played Warhammer video game of any type ever released on Steam, with 225,690 peak concurrent players on Valve’s platform.

Willits won't go into hard numbers for Space Marine 2's success, either in revenue or profit terms, but he has gone on the record to say Space Marine 2 is the fastest-selling game he's ever worked on, and that includes all the Doom, Quake, Wolfenstein, and Rage games id Software released over the 24 years he was at the studio.

Speaking to IGN, Willits revealed that the budget for Space Marine 2 was less than half that of Doom Eternal, the last game he was id Software studio director on before leaving to join Saber in 2019. The suggestion here, of course, is that Space Marine 2, whose standard edition currently costs $59.99 on Steam and $69.99 on console, is already a highly profitable endeavor for all involved.

While Space Marine 2 leans on the power of Games Workshop's Warhammer 40,000 brand, its back-to-basics approach to the action genre and eye-catching alien swarm tech that puts hundreds of Tyranid creatures on-screen at once has wowed critics and gamers. Just shy of three weeks from release, Willits is hopeful Space Marine 2 will end up seeing the sort of player numbers Saber’s co-op zombie shooter World War Z has. World War Z, whose zombie swarm tech was used as the basis of Space Marine 2's Tyranid swarm tech, has seen 25 million players since going on sale in