Who says strategy games don’t sell anymore? If it’s anyone from a larger publisher it’s probably best to ignore them when it comes to financial advice because Paradox Interactive has proven two years in a row that gamers love strategy games.
GamesIndustry.biz is reporting that Paradox Interactive has announced that Stellaris, the diplomatic, civilization building, space management 4x strategy game, has managed to move 200,000 units within the span of just a day, setting a new record for Paradox Interactive that was previously held by Colossal Order’s Cities: Skylines, which managed to move a million copies within the span of a month.
Looking over to Steam Spy, out of those 200,000 copies moved, 77,000 of them belong to Steam owners. So there’s a fair bit of people purchasing games legitimately that are not on Steam.
According to Paradox Interactive’s CEO Fredrik Wester, he mentioned that the developers’ hard work paid off for Stellaris, saying…
“We are immensely proud of the Paradox team for putting together such a stellar release,” […] “This release is the result of hard work and dedication from the entire company and in particular Paradox Development Studio. The incredible reception by players, indicated for instance by the steam user reviews, is all the proof we could ask for that our hard work paid off. Our fans have put their faith in us and Stellaris will be a part of Paradox’s onwards journey for a long time to come.”
GamesIndustry.biz notes that reviews for the game are a bit wildly inconsistent between critics and users. If you look at Metacritic the low-end of the score from critics sits at “60” from IGN, Metro Game Central and PC Gamer, where-as the other 14 scores from various gaming websites from around the world have all scored the game positively.
Interestingly, it looks as if non-American critics like the game a lot more than standard American critics. But according to Steam Spy, majority of the Stellaris player base are American.
The game has an overwhelmingly positive review score on Steam at the moment, so there’s definitely a divide between American gamers and American press.
You can pick up a copy of Stellaris right now from the Steam store for $49.99 or you can learn more about the game by visiting the official website.
(Main image courtesy of HANAttila)