If the commercial advantages of unrestricted crossplay were not clear enough, the wizards at Bohemia Interactive have some numbers to convince you.

The Czech company's latest product is ARMA Reforger, a sandbox first-person shooter with a flair for realism that is hardly accessible or has any mainstream appeal.

ARMA Reforger is a limited endeavor within its niche compared to previous Bohemia titles. It only has two maps (though a third is on the way) and three playable factions, and it exists merely as a technology testbed for ARMA 4, which is at least two years away.

The limitations are clear, but so are the numbers. According to Bohemia Interactive, ARMA Reforger today has 172,000 daily users. A major drive for the game's commercial success is the decision to target consoles when tactical shooters hardly ever venture outside of the comfort of Windows.

Despite certain companies' aversion to letting their players interact with other platforms (look at you, Sony), the crossplay landscape is slowly improving. A big driver for this is the reevaluation of exclusivity contracts, especially among major game development studios.

ARMA Reforger initially launched for PC and Xbox Series X/S in 2022. The early access version had a single map and was a bit of a buggy mess, but it survived the early days, reaching gold in November 2023.

The game spawned a strong mod scene (though not nearly as thorough as that of ARMA 3), and sold enough copies for Bohemia to believe a PlayStation port was worth the money.

ARMA Reforger came out on PlayStation 5 in December 2024, and sold 262,000 copies within the first four weeks, according to Bohemia on social media.

The Czech developer has yet to find a way to implement mod support on PlayStation 5, but Sony and Bohemia are working on a solution.

A glance at the Steam graph for ARMA Reforger shows just how valuable crossplay can be. The game's daily concurrent peak on PC settled around the 5,000 mark on April 2024 and stayed this way for the rest of the year.

Following the release of ARMA Reforger on PlayStation 5, the game's PC population doubled. December saw peaks of 9,600, and so far January has crossed the 12,500 concurrent players mark, the absolute record for the game.

Of course, a part of the player base increase is down to Bohemia constantly improving the game, but there is no denying that having full crossplay has made the game more appealing. More friends playing together, more money made by the studios, what's there not to love?

Posted: 4 hours, 19 minutes ago
Related Forum: PC Gaming Forum

Source: https://www.dualshockers.com/arma-reforger-hits-172000-daily-users-full-crossplay/