Hear that hissing noise? It’s the Steam effect, invisible to the naked eye but for the dramatic improvement in fortunes of the games in its wake. Take ArmA II mod and human depravity sim DayZ, which since the discounting of its parent game during the Steam Summer Sale has flown past a total of 800,000 unique players.
Of those, more than 191,000 have played in the last 24 hours, according to the mod’s official site counter. At its recent peak DayZ enjoyed 45,000 concurrent players, which is quite something considering that the average lifespan of those players is around 49 minutes. “And the servers didn’t spontaneously combust!”, tweeted the dev team. “Beans for everyone!”
DayZ mod creator Dean ‘Rocket’ Hall has a standalone version of the game planned for release before Christmas. Beans indeed.