DayZ hits record player numbers almost 10 years after launch

Not even a decade of existence could daunt one of the most influential titles in gaming history, as DayZ broke its own record in concurrent players 10 years after launch. A recent update, equally strange and significant, has prompted players to give the zombie sim another go.

DayZ has hit a new high of 69,372 players, six thousand more than its previous peak in January 2023. The game’s seeing unprecedented popularity, as according to Steam Charts, it’s peaking at more than double the players on its release day in 2018. In those times, the game averaged between 15 and 20 thousand concurrent players, and it’s been recording massive peaks in the last year or two.

The game has been out since 2013 and will be celebrating its tenth anniversary in December. Though it only saw a full release in 2018, the game has seen numerous updates and patches in the last decade, and it seems that its latest one (albeit the strangest) has managed to bring in a massive wave of people back to the game.

The most significant changes? The sky. Yes, the developers are slowly running out of things to patch, update, and add to the game’s massive content library, so they’re now resorting to changing the color of the sky. While that’s quite romantic, and it may especially be so for ERP enjoyers to bask in the violet sunset, it’s not exactly what brought players back to DayZ.

Update 1.23 revamped the layout of the infamous Vybor Air Base, adding several new places of interest. The developers claim that they’ve focused on creating a greater sense of paranoia in the area, adding to that high-risk, high-reward style of gameplay that DayZ players are more than familiar with. The update also saw the addition of new assets for the DMR, alongside a new compact shovel and new apparel.

But perhaps the most significant change is the way spawns work. DayZ devs added so-called spawn groups that are intended to spawn new players closer to each other. While this will certainly ease the process of finding your Discord pals, it’ll also likely result in your encountering enemies way earlier than usual. The update’s aim seems to be to elevate the sense of danger in DayZ‘s hot zones, one of which will now be the server’s spawn regions.

It’s always a blast seeing games rise as time goes by. Most die by the next decade, but DayZ defies all odds, and its place in the gaming industry is unrivaled. Without it, we’d likely not have the battle royale genre as we know it, and the trend of early-access survival titles would probably not exist.

Not everyone will agree that either of those things had a positive impact on gaming, but one thing’s certain: DayZ started them. And it’s here to stay.