Crusader Kings III has joined the ‘one million copies sold’ club, and it’s only been a couple of months since it launched at the start of September. Paradox Interactive has just run a live stream of its Interim Q3 report on Twitch, and has just announced some big numbers for the medieval grand strategy game.
CEO Ebba Ljungerud and CFO Alexander Bricca have been going through the numbers and key points for Q3, and Crusader Kings III was front and centre. Ljungerud mentioned that the game has achieved a 91% score on Metacritic, as well as a 92% approval rating on Steam across 20,000 user reviews. Ljungerund also mentioned that everyone’s favourite murder simulator passed the one million units milestone in early October, just over a month from launch.
For some context, it took Hearts of Iron IV until May 2018 – just under two years from launch – to reach the one million mark, and Stellaris hit 1.5 million in February 2018. Up until the launch of Crusader Kings III, Hearts of Iron IV was consistently Paradox’s most-played grand strategy game.
Incidentally, this also means Crusader Kings III has passed at least the first threshold as part of Steam’s new revenue share policy. Typically Valve take a 30% cut, but if a game sells more $10 million USD then that rate drops to 25%. If a game hits $50 million in sales, that rate then drops again to 20%.
Other talking points in the interim report included the cancellation of one unannounced external project, and with the recent acquisition of Playrion and Iceflake the company now owns nine internal studios. The Europa Universalis IV subscription test is still on-going, and going quite well albeit with a small sample. There was also lots of numbers and math, including an increase in operating profit of 102% for Q3 2020. You can watch the stream archive here:
Crusader Kings III is Paradox’s most popular internal strategy game to-date, and has set a new benchmark for future generations of titles in this niche. If you want to read more about it, we’ve got a guide to the best Crusader Kings 3 mods, a guide to interesting character starts, and much more.