Hazelight Studios’ A Way Out has moved over a million copies across PC, PS4 and Xbox One. The cooperative action game directed by Josef Fares was released back on March 23rd, 2018, and it only took four weeks to move a million copies.

That’s not too bad for a indie title that received some light publishing and distribution support from Electronic Arts. I’m pretty sure they would have been able to move several hundred thousand more copies have the game been available on Steam, but you know how some publishers have an aversion to profitability.

Anyway, the news about the million copies being sold came courtesy of a tweet, where Josef Fares retweeted a tweet from Hazelight, acknowledging that not only did they sell a million copies but more than two million people have had access to the game.

HOLY SHIT, this means that 2 million players have played the game. Thank you so much❤ https://t.co/W8WP6HI44Z

— Josef Fares (@josef_fares) April 13, 2018

The reason that the player engagement doubles is because you can only play A Way Out with a second person, either via split-screen in local co-op or by split-screen in online co-op.

Unlike other co-op titles out there, there is no way to play A Way Out in a single-player mode. You always need a second player to play the game. A lot of it boils down to the way the game is played. There are some instances where an AI just wouldn’t have the cognitive arbitration to determine what the human player is attempting or trying to do. For instance, there are multiple moments in the game where a player may want to fiddle around with environmental items, or put in some effort on a swing, or perform a specific task at a specific time. Artificial intelligence doesn’t quite have that capability, but I suppose they could have mapped some AI control schemes to the gamepads in order to compensate.

The co-op title managed to get the spotlight put on it leading up towards its release thanks to an anti-Oscar rant from Josef Fares.

Some well done trailers, a decent price point, and positive word of mouth seems to have worked in the favor of Hazelight and now A Way Out has become a success. Whether or not the game is profitable is a whole other discussion, but if they can manage to move 2 million or so copies, I imagine they could easily hit the profitability mark.