The survival MMO H1Z1 has sold over a million copies. We take a look at the surprise hit from 2015.
John Smedley, the president of Daybreak Game Company, formerly SOE, tweeted this:
We have sold over 1M copies of H1Z1 on Steam!
— John Smedley (@j_smedley) March 24, 2015
One million copies of the new game H1Z1 have been sold during Early Access for around 20 euros/dollars on Steam. Certainly a huge success for an underdog game that was initially only intended as a pastime for the developers. A success that few would have expected. We tell the story behind this Steam hit.
This is the story of H1Z1
The story of H1Z1 is unusual. It was only at the end of 2013 that the idea to develop something like this came up. A small team at SOE was actually working on a World War FPS-MOBA, but had dead time to fill while waiting for new software.
The team had many fans of DayZ, the “Dawn-of-the-Dead” movies, and The Walking Dead, so the idea for a survival MMO with a strong zombie influence emerged. They took the engine from their own game “Planetside 2” as a template; many from the team came from PS2, and they knew the engine inside and out. Rapidly, “H1Z1” took shape. President Smedley was enthusiastic about the game. They decided to develop this instead of the MOBA. Smedley introduced the game to fans early on, wanting to develop H1Z1 with constant feedback; Reddit would serve as both forum and homepage, and Smedley even announced an Early Access release within a few months. The first date was set for May 2014.
The announcement then backfired as the team internally decided not to release the game so early and to continue its development to not jeopardize the studio’s name. They also noticed that not only their own employees were fully caught up in the zombie hype, but also a large part of the player base. In 2014, to promote H1Z1, they mainly focused on streams and collaborated with established streamers within the genre.
At the beginning of 2015, H1Z1 finally went into Early Access and faced a lot of criticism, especially from German gaming magazines, about how a “big studio” like SOE could release a game in this state via Early Access. Internationally, fan criticism was primarily directed at a game element perceived as pay-to-win. However, this was quickly adjusted.
On Steam, despite the criticism, H1Z1 took off like a bomb and even competed with DayZ for a while. They charged nearly 20 euros/dollars for Early Access.
Meanwhile, SOE is no longer a large studio; they have left Sony, parted ways with employees, and money seems tight. A surprise hit like H1Z1 is more than welcome.
H1Z1 is currently being actively developed; a further server wipe will come in the next weeks, Australian servers were recently launched, new player models are expected to be introduced in-game in April. Once the game is stable on PC, it will switch to a free-to-play model and later also be released for Playstation 4.
For those wondering: What distinguishes H1Z1 from DayZ? We heartily recommend our article, which MMO elements characterize H1Z1.
