Border guard sim Contraband Police has reached an impressive new milestone a year after its launch. The game has now sold over 800k copies globally.
PlayWay CEO Krzysztof Kostowski shared the news on X last week, saying that Contraband Police also generated $10 million on Steam. These are the game’s lifetime net revenue after the platform’s 30% cut, taxes, and refunds.
According to Kostowski, Polish studio CrazyRocks, which developed Contraband Police, is entitled to 75% of the total.
He also added that the US accounted for 34% of the 145.9k units sold over the last three months. But it is unclear what the other top countries are. And the title also has 800k wishlists.
UPDATE (March 26): Following the publication of the original article, Kostowski took to X to update previous data, saying that Contraband Police had already reached 836k copies sold.
Contraband = 10mln $ Lifetime Steam revenue (net)
75% dla CrazyRocks ( 77,9% w PLW ) pic.twitter.com/yxE6Gs1e0y— Krzysztof Kostowski (@kriswawa) March 19, 2024
Below are the main sales milestone for Contraband Police since its release on March 8, 2023:
- 49k copies — March 10, 2023;
- 100k copies — March 13, 2023;
- 200k copies — March 22, 2023;
- 300k copies — April 19, 2023;
- 400k copies — July 3, 2023;
- 500k copies — August 25, 2023;
- 600k copies — November 4, 2023;
- 670k copies — December 22, 2023;
- 800k copies — March 19, 2024.
It is worth noting that the game recouped its development and marketing costs of up to PLN 2 million (around $454.7k at the March 2023 exchange rate) in the first two days after launch. The sudden success also saved Crazy Rocks, which was on the verge of bankruptcy in 2017 before reaching out to PlayWay and coming up with the concept for Contraband Police. As the studio’s founder Stanisław Gromadowski said at the time, “we postponed the release date multiple times, but honestly speaking — after 3 years of work, I knew it was my life’s project.”
Contraband Police currently has an “Overwhelmingly Positive” rating on Steam, with 95% of the 13.1k user reviews being positive. With 8,124 peak concurrent players, it is also the 5th most played title in PlayWay’s portfolio (via SteamDB). Other games in the top 5 include Car Mechanic Simulator 2021 (22.5k CCU), House Flipper 2 (18.1k CCU), House Flipper (15.9k CCU), adn Car Mechanic Simulator 2018 (8.4k CCU).