Dead Island 2's development hell has paid off with 1M launch weekend sales

It looks like Dead Island 2's tumultuous years of development hell have paid off. Its launch weekend was a success, with Deep Silver revealing that the zombie-slaying action game managed to shift over a million copies.

That's a pretty good payoff for almost a decade of chaotic development. Considering it went through a multitude of developers—first Yager in 2014, to an unnamed developer in 2015, to Sumo Digital in 2016, before finally settling on Dambuster Studios in 2019. Most games don't even make it through that number of development studios to a full release, so to see the game make it out on the other side and have decent launch weekend numbers to show for it is a small miracle. Deep Silver shared some other fun stats, like players slaying over a billion zombies while meeting their own demise around 28 million times.

For the most part, the game seems to have gone down pretty well with fans. Responses to Deep Silver's sales tweet are largely positive, with many praising the series' long-awaited return. Lewis Parker wasn't quite as keen in his Dead Island 2 review, though. "Apart from the admittedly impressive technical performance, it's hard to find much reason to recommend Dead Island 2," he wrote. "Although the combat feels responsive and intuitive, it sadly does little to compensate for the game's numerous shortfalls – especially when said gameplay barely evolves throughout the game's twenty hour campaign."