Prison Architect has broken free onto Early Access; here’s our Prison Architect review.
Prison Architect, the prison management game from indie darlings Introversion, might still be in closed alpha, but that hasn’t prevented over 32,000 sales of the game, raising in excess of of a million dollars for its developers. Crikey. Then again, Prison Architect made over $100,000 in just 36 hours, so this is a game that had a heck of a head start.
Those sales come from pre-orders ranging from a basic $30 copy of the game up through special offers that allow buyers to appear as characters in the game. At the top of this pile of offers were half a dozen Warden Packs which retailed for $1,000 apiece and allowed players to design one of the game’s prison wardens. All of these are now long gone, though amongst a million dollars that $6,000 is just a drop in the ocean: Introversion have simply sold a lot of copies of the game.
If you’re wondering why the game is so popular, our own Prison Architect preview gives you an idea of just how impressed we were with the early build we looked at back in the summer. Since then, we’ve kept a close eye on the alpha and reported on updates and improvements, including the addition of rap sheets and changes to prisoner AI.
Without even using your F5 key, you can keep up with the ever-growing sales of Prison Architect on the game’s site, where a rolling total shows you how much money the game is making. Even as I typed up this news piece, Introversion made an extra $600. Damn, I’m in the wrong business.