Subnautica has sold over 2 million copies on its first day of early access, with over 600K concurrent players in its opening hours.
The sequel to the massively popular survival game entered early access on Thursday. Just over one hour after the game’s release, the Subnautica X account posted an announcement that the game had sold over 1 million copies.
Just hours later, developer Unknown Worlds announced that the game had sold over 2 million copies in just twelve hours as the game topped charts around the world.
According to SteamDB, the game managed a peak Steam concurrent player count of 467,582 players. This makes Subnautica 2 the game with the 29th highest concurrent player count in Steam history.
This number doesn’t include players who are playing Subnautica 2 via Xbox Game Preview or via the Epic Game Store. According to a press release from Unknown Worlds, the peak concurrent player count across all platforms has topped 651,000.
Before the game’s release, Subnautica 2’s development cycle was mired in a legal saga that saw the leadership team of developer Unknown Worlds fired.
Earlier this year, publisher Krafton was accused of ignoring a court order by announcing to staff that the game was releasing in May, despite such a decision seemingly being the responsibility of the newly reinstated CEO Ted Gill.
Gill, co-founder and creative director Charlie Cleveland, and co-founder and technical director Max McGuire were fired by Krafton last year, with the publisher accusing the trio of an “absence of core leadership” and claiming it felt “a profound sense of betrayal by their failure to honor the trust placed in them by our fans”.
The three claimed, however, that Krafton had betrayed them by firing them right before delaying Subnautica 2, a move they allege was designed to deliberately prevent its Early Access release, and avoid it selling well enough to trigger a $250 million bonus for the development team.
