Sons of the Forest is the new PC game hit with over 2 million copies sold in first 24 hours

A few days ago, Warner Bros Interactive announced that its Harry Potter-based game Hogwarts Legacy had sold 12 million copies in its first two weeks on sale. That's some pretty impressive sales numbers for any game, but remember that it was made as an AAA-budgeted game based on a well-known entertainment franchise, and had tons of hype and marketing well ahead of its launch.

Having said all that, consider the Thursday launch of Sons of the Forest, from developer Endnight Games. The game didn't get a fraction of the mass media marketing of Hogwarts Legacy, and launched in Early Access on just one platform, the PC on Steam. Yet, the developers posted on Twitter late Friday that the game had already sold over two million copies just 24 hours after it launched.

As of the writing of this article, Sons of the Forest remains the top-selling game on Steam in the US and worldwide, ahead of Hogwarts Legacy, which currently is in third place. It's also in the top five among the most players currently playing games on Steam, with a peak of well over 400,000 players in the last 24 hours.

So, what is Sons of the Forest? It's actually a sequel to Vancouver-based Endnight's first game The Forest. It launched in early access for the PC in 2014, and officially launched in 2018 for the PC and PlayStation 4 consoles. The game sold 5.3 million copies by the end of that year.

Both The Forest and the sequel are open-world survival horror games set in dense forest locations. The storyline for Sons of the Forest centers on the player character, who is sent to a remote island on a mission to find a missing billionaire and his family. However, the player character soon has far more immediate issues as his helicopter crash lands. He now has to survive on the island, find the missing rich people, and deal with the island's mutated inhabitants.

Players can play the game alone with an AI NPC companion, Kelvin. You can also play with up to seven friends in online multiplayer. No matter how you play, you must build shelters, use and create tools and weapons, and defend yourself against the island's population and the changing seasons, all while trying to solve the mystery of the missing billionaire in a setting that's four times the size of The Forest.

Sons of the Forest's development has taken a while longer than Endnight originally planned (it was due to be first released in 2021 but has suffered through a number of delays). It looks like the wait has been worth it.