When indie game developer and publisher Landfall decided to launch its latest PC game, the horror-themed co-op title Content Warning, it did something a bit differently. It launched the game on April 1 by giving the full version away for its first 24 hours.
As you can imagine, that decision let over 6.6 million people get the game for free on its first day. It also caused the online concurrent player count on Steam to go up to as high as 204,439 players, according to SteamDB.
After that free first day, Content Warning became a paid title, although one with a pretty reasonable price of just $7.99. However, with over 6 million copies sent out for free, you might think there was no one left who wanted to get the game. You would be wrong.
This weekend, Landfall posted on its X (formerly Twitter) account that since the free first day, Content Warning has sold 1 million copies at that $7.99 price tag.
Bring out the party poopers!
— Landfall (@LandfallGames) April 13, 2024
Content Warning has now sold 1M copies on top of the 6.6M players that got the game for free! 🎉
Thank you all so much for liking our scary Iill game ♥️ pic.twitter.com/7zBUW40VJk
This proves that there is more than one way to get people to play your game and also make money from it. You do have to wonder if other developers, especially smaller indie teams, might think this business model could be replicated for future releases.
We should also mention that while the current online concurrent player count for Content Warning is well below its peak, it"s still pretty respectable for a small indie game. SteamDB shows it had a 24-hour peak of 33,569 players.
In a follow-up post on X, Landfall also stated that it is working on "some fun updates and fixes on the way" for Content Warning"s 7.6 million (and counting) players.