“We found a great balance in realism and fun in SCUM” - How Gamepires and Devolver's survival title shifted 250k copies in 24 hours

pcgamesinsider.biz:

The slow-burn long form of survival games is in decline - with DayZ quickly pushed aside by games like Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds, it’d be easy to think the demand for more patient survival experiences like Gamepires’ SCUM just wasn’t there anymore.

But the Croatian team proved there’s still a lucrative audience for the genre. SCUM rapidly became publisher Devolver Digital’s fastest-selling release yet, selling a quarter of a million copies within 24 hours.

Gamepires community manager Josip Barisic spoke to us following the unprecedented success of the studio’s simulationist survival-sandbox.

How has the launch of SCUM been so far?

In one word, ecstatic. No one of us ever dreamed of such an outcome. That a small Croatian studio would have the biggest game launch in Croatian game dev history, just the thought of that drives you to improve the game as much as possible with continuous patches and updates, which we make on a daily basis. So yeah, the launch was awesome, and beyond everything we expected.

This brand of slow-burn survival seems to have been overtaken by battle royale in recent years. What part of SCUM seems to have brought players back?

We found a great balance in realism and fun in SCUM. Starting from our complex metabolism that counts every vitamin that you digest, to our real-time ballistic system. SCUM can be played by anyone, really; if you are a beginner you can jump in and slowly learn the ropes. As intimidating as the whole metabolism screen is, you don't need to pay attention to it if you don't want to.

You will be perfectly fine just by eating and drinking like a normal person and continue your story on the island. Also, if people are more oriented towards shooter games, we have events where our