DayZ sells a million

DayZ, the zombie survival sim that released on Steam Early Access at the end of last year, has sold an incredible one million copies in the last four weeks.

The milestone was confirmed in a tweet from the game's creator, Dean "Rocket" Hall, who said: "Well, 1 million copies in 4 weeks. So much for the death of PC Gaming."

The title, which was originally a mod for military simulator Arma 2, was released as a work-in-progress offering to an eager community on December 17. After selling one million copies at £19.99, it's easy to deduce that the game has already made around £20 million in sales, despite bugs and a distinct lack of publicity.

"I think being very open with the release helped a great deal," Hall said to MCV in a recent interview. "Our media strategy was simply to not have one. We spent no money on marketing, and we actively worked with Steam to reduce the marketing footprint."

He then added: "With a strong concept and an open, honest dialogue, direct with customers through social media - people got what they wanted and that resulted in successful sales."

"We chose to do what was right for the game, for the customer, first and foremost. Sometimes that meant delaying the release, changing the price, spending more on initial servers, etc... that resulted in a better product and people see that," Hall concluded.

As you can only buy the game digitally on Steam you won't find it taking a place in this week's UK charts, which it surely would if digital sales were taken into account.