How Project Zomboid just... kept selling?
And why its upcoming update may be huge. Also: the latest platform & discovery news.
[The GameDiscoverCo game discovery newsletter is written by ‘how people find your game’ expert & company founder Simon Carless, and is a regular look at how people discover and buy video games in the 2020s.]
And we’re back. Hope everyone is having a pleasant time, as we center today’s newsletter not on the highest-profile sales winner, but on a stalwart zombie title that’s now grossed 9 figures (!) by being the deepest, most moddable experience around.
Before we start, does anyone remember ‘the Boxleiter number’? We referenced it back in 2020 - it was early Steam sales estimates, using review multipliers. Nostalgia hit over it because Mike Boxleiter announced his new game, co-op shooter Lazy River - set in “the galaxy’s most unregulated waterpark” - during SGF. (Don’t pee in the pool.)
[THE DEEPEST PC/CONSOLE DATA? You can get a free demo of our GameDiscoverCo Pro company-wide ‘Steam deep dive’ & console data by reaching out today - >100 orgs have it. Or, signing up to GDCo Plus gets the rest of this newsletter and Discord access, plus more.]
Game disco news: some games got announced…
We have our proper Summer Game Fest (& friends) data post coming on Friday. But we’ll cover a few of the initial highlights in our news round-up today:
As you might have spotted (above), we collab-ed with Geoff Keighley on data used kicking off the Summer Game Fest event on Friday, pointing out that although there’s >9k new games on Steam already this year, 10 of the 14 games that we think sold >1m copies LTD (above) were from independents. That’s good, rite?
Oh, Summer Game Fest announces? They were pretty impressive this year, inc. Resident Evil Veronica (a Code: Veronica remake), new Cuphead games, Guild Wars 3, 1666 Amsterdam (from Patrice Desilets), a new PlatinumGames Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game & a multi-platform (yay!) Final Fantasy VII Revelation.
Remember that change to Steam’s top all-time wishlists charts to be more ‘trending’ we ran as breaking news on Friday? Uh, it got reverted 3-4 hours later (!) to once again show unreleased games with the most Steam wishlists, give or take. (So, either a genuine bug, or a change that Valve reconsidered after feedback…)
Here’s everything announced in the Xbox showcase, inc. new Spyro & Senua games. But the big platform deal was Xbox console exclusives (not just timed - they’re ‘never’ coming to PlayStation) for Gears Of War: E-Day and Clockwork Revolution, a couple of mid/higher-profile Xbox releases for 2026/2027.
Xbox’s Matt Booty went on GamerTag Radio to detail more on the semi-pivot: “Xbox console exclusive is about the desire to give players a reason to buy an Xbox… live service games will continue to be full multiplatform… previously announced ports will be honored for [those] platforms… Future games will be a case by case basis.”
Want a spicy take on Steam’s algo changes? Patrick Seibert provides: “Steam's Popular Upcoming wishlists were worthless. Those were just numbers to make small indie devs feel good. They did not convert to sales! I stopped years ago optimising for time spent on Popular Upcoming… and instead focused on time in New & Trending!”
Today’s Nintendo Direct is the final SGF-ish showcase, and here’s the lowdown - we saw a Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time remake for Switch 2, confirmation of Kingdom Hearts IV (multi-platform, inc. Switch 2 on Day 1), and a new Xenoblade JRPG. Oh, and Nintendo Switch Sports Resort, haha. (Decent overall.)
The European Union’s possible crackdown on F2P virtual currency is getting lobbied against by major mobile gameco-s, with Supercell’s Ilkka Paananen telling the Financial Times: “Basically, [F2P mobile] games would become unplayable in Europe . . . Mobile games is one of the very few industries where Europe and the Nordics specifically can claim they are the leader.”
In ‘platforms finally dealing with unfortunate side effects’ news, Delisted Games is tracking a whole bunch of ‘easy Platinum trophy’ shovelware publishers on PlayStation announcing the removal of their games. (Anyone know how Sony is phrasing their messaging to publishers? Looks like there’s a delisting deadline.)
Nintendo things: Switch 2 hardware sales dropped 87% week-on-week in Japan after its price increase. (But there was a ‘buy before more $’ spike, so at 32k per week, it’s now at ~70% of the pre-price change numbers.) Also: Nintendo was hit with a €35 million fine in France over the long-running Switch 1 Joy-Con drift.
We’ll cover this all more on Friday, but here’s all the games announced during Day Of The Devs, inc. a new Trine game & a Yooka-Laylee kart racer; here’s all the PC Gaming Show announces, inc. a Star Trek outpost builder & a new Cassette Beasts game. (GamesRecap has all of the trailers in one place, also check out the Story Rich Showcase, the Wholesome Direct showcase & more.)
Microlinks: No Rest for the Wicked director says Xbox version won’t release alongside PS5 because ‘Series S is making that rough’; the game-related winners of the Apple Desgn Awards include Is This Seat Taken?, Blue Prince & Consume Me; Minecraft has added an affiliate program for influences to take a cut of IAP $.
OUR SPONSOR: Player.gg x Summer Game Fest
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How Project Zomboid hit ‘evergreen’ stealthily…
If you have a good memory, you may recall we wrote a newsletter on co-op isometric zombie survival game Project Zomboid back in 2022, after it launched its online mode for the first time (after being on Steam since 2013!) and had a major ‘moment’, with its sales numbers spiking by 23x.
Well, we’re planning a series of articles on games that are quietly and massively ‘evergreen’, and realized that Project Zomboid is a prime example of this. Look how much the game has scaled, Steam copies sold-wise, since 2022:
So yep, GDCo is estimating Project Zomboid at >15 million units (!) sold on Steam alone, with a median playtime of >13 hours (& an average of >65 hours), and a regular spot in the Top 50 most-played games on Steam by concurrent users. It’s huuge.
A lot of this uptick has come with the co-op upgrade simply making the game a lot more streamable for group playthroughs, while new systemic depths have been developed even for single-player games, via the upcoming Build42 upgrade (as showcased by the above multi-hour ‘in-game narrative’ YouTube video.)
We can see the viral effect via an upcoming GDCo Pro data view, combining PZ’s sales with Twitch hours watched* (*more soon, we’re just honing it!) Not only is the game lodged near the Top 100, watcher-wise, the post-2021 streaming spikes are v.mighty:
For those who haven’t played it - Project Zomboid isn’t a ‘run around gunning down zombies in their thousands’ Vampire Survivors-like. Rather, it’s a painstakingly complex & brutal survival sim where individual limbs can be injured & planning bases, gear scavenging & escape routes is the order of the day. So why has it done this well?
Seven key reasons for Project Zomboid’s success?
To work that out, we asked Project Zomboid’s creative director Will Porter - who’s been working on the game as a co-founder of The Indie Stone for over 15 years - what he thought the ‘continuing sales drive’ for the game was. He had some great answers:
Play it your way: “We are, overall, a sandbox game… if people don’t like something they can turn it off.” The title does have game modes, but “we are very much ‘Choose Your Own Zombie Survival Adventure’. This clearly is of great appeal to the zombie survival audience, within which are a range of very specific personal tastes.”
The modding scene is vital: “Mods convert our game from being finite, if sandbox, authored content and turn it into a platform [of] itself.” Will cites “total mod magician Slayer” - check Week One - & “the amazing recent horse mod” as two key examples, noting that half of the current Zomboid dev team are ex-modders. He also notes a recent team re-org focusing on “how to improve the modder’s lot once B42 is out.”
The game is oddly age-agnostic: “We always assumed that PZ was an oldie’s game – which I guess in the modern parlance would be ‘a game for uncs’. The look, the tone and the gameplay is as much Ultima Online, The Sims 1 and XCOM as anything else.” But as he says: “For whatever reason, generations younger than us keep picking [the game] up, hanging out with their friends in it (this is a big part of it) and streaming.” Indeed, GDCo’s Steam Fan Snapshot data for PZ has av. age slightly below the median…
Will adds on this subject: “We also see a lot of parents who’ve been with us since the beginning playing with their kids, husbands and wives - surviving together, etc. There’s quite a lot of wholesome going on if you peer beneath the surface of the death and fighting.”
But wait, there’s more! We pried another four reasons why Zomboid has such staying power from Will, and we like all of these, too:
Some serious watchability: “Project Zomboid content is incredibly legible as a piece of watchable and consumable media.” Will notes there’s very little abstraction or cost of entry for viewers, and “it can be easily ‘narrated over’ by YouTubers and streamers. Beyond zombie hordes, there’s spread of fire, sickness, flashlights running out of batteries, vehicles running out of gas all at critical moments” - all very relatable.
Epically complex in-game progression: “The game’s long progression continues to add to this, giving the character name weight in the story generated from long running playthroughs.” Combined with social betrayal and cooperation, and “permadeath raising the stakes”, there are so many anecdote-worthy situations and ‘runs’.
Love from people who play nothing else but Project Zomboid: “Once upon a time players who’d played 1,000 hours would be an amazing curio… now it feels like the majority of people who directly talk to us with warranted praise, warranted criticism and (lots of) warranted bug reports have between 1,000 and 5,000 hours in-game.” Hardcore fanbase matters, folks.
The game is ‘cheaper than it’s actually worth’: it started at 5 UKP and is even now ‘just’ $20 USD, it’s “an amazing deal – and we like it that way”, as Will says. He also adds: “They also appreciate that we don’t have a history of microtransactions, pay-to-win, spurious DLC and such.” (Not a luxury all game franchises have, but they got it!)
One thing Will said in answering this question vibed with us, so we’re just reprinting it in full. In effect, he’s recognizing his team’s privilege in being there early:
“I feel games born in earlier Steam eras have benefitted from slower discovery cycles, a stronger forum and community culture, and less saturation. We have noticed that older games like us have had more opportunity over time to accumulate long-term social capital, and mod ecosystems.
We still benefit from how it was in the past, and are buffeted by the same winds that carried the game in less crowded and more optimistic times. If we were new on the circuit today, it would perhaps be a very different story.”
On the other hand, maybe there are room for more games in this subgenre now! It’s very Zomboid-y, but HumanitZ has been doing decently recently - we have it at $10m gross. But it’s true - building up community when it was quieter really paid off…
How do you deal with a harsh learning curve in PZ?
If you look at GDCO Pro’s review sentiment overview for Project Zomboid - based on the most helpful Steam reviews in the last year - you can see it’s very positive overall, but you can see the phrase ‘learning curve’ loom even in the positive reviews. (And we don’t think it’s twinned with the phrase ‘easy’…)
And look, the game got so complex that it’s spawned Dwarf Fortress levels of absurdity in its patch notes, for example this latest one, which includes gems like:
Fixed towels not getting wet in the rain
Fixed players with wounded feet being able to accelerate when pressing Shift before WASD
Fixed animal weight changing after being placed on a butchering hook and removed.
Wow! Re: patches/updates, there’s a separate convo about the (likely non-optimum) length of time that the major Build 42 update has been in an ‘unstable’ Beta branch - 18 months and counting. (Though the patches for it are big and frequent, and we’re guessing the Build 42 launch isn’t too far away - then we’ll see a giant sales spike.)
We talked to Will about that in our full Q&A, which we’re linking to on Google Drive in case you’re curious. (Spoiler: the devs are speeding to Build 42 release while focusing on “how best to keep the community fed and watered post-42, while also catering for more blockbuster versions with hopefully lessened wait times.”)
But for the newsletter, we wanted to drill down on learning curve. And we 100% dug Will’s response to whether this was a problem:
“Project Zomboid is a brick wall, but people love the feeling of colliding with it. The time at which you are repeatedly dying and (very slowly) gaining a feeling of mastery over the game is often hailed by people in the community as their ‘golden period’ with PZ that they’d love to be able to experience again.
As such, while our tutorial could certainly do with some attention in future, the learning curve isn’t something we’re too concerned about - beyond what we’ve done in Build 42 by making our in-game Survivor’s Guide more easily digestible and more explanatory.”
In other words, if you’re crystal clear about the game’s rule sets, and the game is ‘harsh but fair’, maybe there’s less of a difficulty issue than many might think. Sure, the game has permadeath, but you can start again any time you like…
Finally, we did ask Will about Project Zomboid’s ‘structures of play’, and he echoed some previous comments about why this game is so popular and evergreen. It’s because PZ is not precious about default rulesets, and provides a complexly modeled canvas for you to project your play styles onto. As he told us, to end:
“Everything about PZ makes it readily personalised to the zombie survival adventure that you want to go on. You can go action, or you can go prepper-stealth. You can play it in a forgiving landscape or in something akin to our nighmarish Extinction mode. You can use it as a base-decorating kit, or you can be a looting nomad. You can use it as a dosshouse with your mates or you can do some ultra-serious roleplay with highly detailed characters and interactions.”
[We’re GameDiscoverCo, an analysis firm based around one simple issue: how do players find, buy and enjoy your PC or console game? We run the newsletter you’re reading, and provide real-time data services for publishers, funds, and other smart game industry folks.]