Pacific Drive, an exploration survival game focused on driving through a mysterious exclusion zone, is one of the most notable indie hits this year. The game has exceeded developer Ironwood Studios’ expectations.
Ironwood Studios announced that Pacific Drive has surpassed 600k copies sold globally. The title took nearly five months since its February 22 launch to reach this milestone.
It is available on PC (Steam, Epic Games Store) and PlayStation 5, but it is unclear how sales are split between platforms.
“We are blown away by the response to Pacific Drive. This isn’t a milestone we expected to reach when we first started working on it, it’s a dream come true for us,” Ironwood CEO and creative director Alex Dracott said in a statement, thanking players for their support.
Dracott started his career in the games industry in 2011 as an environment & tech artist intern at PlayStation. He continued his journey at Sony Online Entertainment, working on Planetside 2. He also served as an environment artist at Sucker Punch (Infamous: Second Son) and as lead VFX artist at Oculus VR before going indie and founding Ironwood Studios in November 2019.
Published by Kepler Interactive, Pacific Drive received positive reviews from the press, with an average score of 79 on Metacritic. Player reception was also warm, with the game currently rated “Very Positive” on Steam (83% of the 9.6k user reviews are positive).
Pacific Drive debuted at #13 on Steam’s weekly top sellers chart and peaked at 18,507 concurrent players at launch (via SteamDB).
On July 18, Ironwood Studios released the first free update for Pacific Drive. It introduced various improvements and new features like photo mode. The team plans to release two more updates in 2024, including new difficulty modes and cosmetics (both free and paid).