Bohemia Interactive celebrated 25 years recently. The Czech developer celebrated by announcing the release date for the tactical shooterArmA 4 (to come out in 2027, but any date is better than no date) through an epic orchestral performance.

In a social media post, co-founder Marek Spanel shared some insights on the impact Steam has had on the company's sales.

Bohemia has recorded 47 million copies sold over 25 years. Of those, 40 million of them were through Steam.

Sales data from Steam is nothing new or secret, but this rundown paints a complete picture of the transformative effect the platform commands.

The company's first launch on the Valve marketplace was ArmA 2, released in 2009. To put it mildly, the game had a modest launch, initially recording 174 copies.

Much like Half-Life, the biggest impact ArmA 2 had came from its modding scene, which spawned survival heavy-hitter DayZ, among others.

PlayTracker estimates ArmA 2 to have around 1.93 million owners today, next to 7.66 million for DayZ.

The modding scene propelled DayZ to become one of the most played games on Steam, with an all-time peak of almost 80,000 players reached three days ago, but it might cause trouble for Bohemia later.

As part of the ArmA 4 development roadmap the company released ARMA Reforger, initially pitched as a tech demo to help players and modders get acquainted with the new engine tools.

Reforger eventually grew out of its initial scope, and is now looking like a solid successor to ArmA 3 until its sequel comes out... but players are not moving.

Its population regularly reaches 5,000 concurrent players, while ArmA 3, at its worst year since launch, still attracts around 20,000 players regularly, with ownership estimates that exceed DayZ (12.73M, per PlayTracker).

While ARMA Reforger is far from perfect, the main factor preventing players from making the switch en masse is that ArmA 3 has a near-infinite number of mods and DLCs available.

It is a common theme among players to have a separate drive just to dump Workshop content. ARMA Reforger modders have until 2027 to create enough content to warrant another 1TB in storage.

Posted: Oct 30, 2024 4:39 pm
Related Forum: PC Gaming Forum

Source: https://www.dualshockers.com/arma-dev-steam-insights/