Content Warning is without a doubt one of the biggest surprise hit this year so far. However, developer Landfall Games didn’t expect the game to sell hundreds of thousands of units after the end of its viral free-to-claim launch.
Landfall CEO Wilhelm Nylund shared the sales figures for Content Warning in an interview with PC Gamer. Here are the key takeaways:
- Content Warning sold over 100k copies in its first day of going paid at $8 — this is “multiple times more” than any of the studio’s previous titles;
- It added another 125k units the next day, crossing the 700k mark in its first week;
- Landfall hopes that Content Warning will reach 1 million copies sold in the first two weeks.
The studio didn’t expect the game to blow up so quickly and was afraid that nobody would be interested in purchasing it after the end of the free-to-claim period. However, Nylund still thinks that the first 24 hours, during which Content Warning was free to download, was one of the key factors behind the viral success because “people woke up one day and suddenly they’re just bombarded with a bunch of footage from a new game.”
Launched on April 1, Content Warning generated 6.2 million free downloads in its first 24 hours, peaking at over 204k concurrent players on Steam. And it is impressive to see that the viral start has already added almost 1 million paid users.
Content Warning also became the 5th highest-grossing game on Steam during its debut week, surpassing evegreen hit like PUBG and Apex Legends in terms of gross revenue.
Right now, Landfall is working on its next major game, fast-paced runner with procedurally generated levels HASTE: Broken Worlds. The studio also plans to support Content Warning, which suddenly became an integral part of its portfolio, with more updates in the future.