Dead Island 2 Sells Over 1 Million Copies Globally in Only Three Days

Dead Island 2 sales have surpassed 1 million copies worldwide, publisher Deep Silver and developer Dambuster Studios have announced.

This means that the long-overdue sequel to 2011's Dead Island has sold over 1 million copies in only three days after launching last week on April 21. These numbers imply that the game's development hell hasn't affected the interest in this Zombie-killing sequel. We don't know the current total sales of the original Dead Island, but back in 2013, publisher Deep Silver revealed that the original game sold over 5 million copies worldwide following its release in September 2011.

“Dead Island has an incredibly active and enthusiastic community, and we are thrilled to welcome the 5-millionth player to the world of Banoi", Klemens Kundratitz, CEO of Deep Silver's parent company, Koch Media (now Plaion), said in February 2013. "This once again proves that venturing into new waters in terms of games publishing does matter for success and that even at the end of a console cycle, new [intellectual properties] can be created and nurtured into lasting franchises.”

The news was announced via an official press release just now. Alongside these impressive sales numbers, Deep Silver and Dambuster Studios also shared some interesting early statistics:

Over 11 million hours were played during the game's first weekend on sale, while more than 28 million players found their in-game end. Also, 45 million zombies were sliced in half, and over 756 million limbs were cut off. In total, 1.1 billion zombies have been slain since Friday.

Despite not being a particularly long game, its linear level design, and somewhat shallow combat, we were quite happy with Dead Island 2. "Games that go through development hell hardly turn out great, but Dambuster Studio proved with Dead Island 2 that this is not always the case, although the game is far from a masterpiece", we wrote in our launch review. "While the gameplay works and feels quite fun at the start of the game, things become repetitive very quickly due to the linearity of the experience and the shallowness of the combat system. Offering nothing more than some mindless fun, the game would have been more than fine if launched at a lower price, but at full price, Dead Island 2 doesn't offer that much to justify it."

Not only has the game turned out pretty good on PC, but the sequel has proven to be well-optimized across all platforms, offering good performance and great visuals across the board.

Dead Island 2 is available worldwide now for PC, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox Series X|S, and Xbox One.

Written by Aernout van de Velde