Bohemia Interactive have announced that DayZ has achieved 3 million sales, just over a year after being released on Steam Early Access. From the beginning of the DayZ Early Access program, the DayZ team has continued to update the game on a regular basis. Since the initial release the team has released 24 updates to the main public branch of the game.

These updates have been focused on improving DayZ, and have included core redesigns of some of the most significant features including the inventory, multiplayer architecture and map improvements. As the DayZ team outlined in their development plan for 2015, there are many more large improvements in the pipeline, such as the transition to an improved anti-cheat system and multiplayer optimizations.

One of the largest changes that the DayZ team began in 2014 was to rewrite the core engine. Improving the engine will have significant long term benefits to DayZ and all of DayZ’s 3,000,000 players. The name of the new engine is Enfusion. The main benefits to reinventing the core engine are in the upgrades to the renderer, as this will enhance performance for players, and also vastly improve the visual aesthetics of particle effects. In the long run these improvements to the engine will enable DayZ to utilize DirectX 11, which will further enhance the experience of console versions of DayZ. Enfusion will also bring upgraded tools for both the DayZ team and content creators, improving the efficiency of creating official content and modifications. Currently DayZ is still mostly using the Real Virtuality engine, however throughout 2015 DayZ will progressively switch to utilizing Enfusion to a greater extent.

All of these improvements have been possible due to the expansion of the DayZ team to over 80 people. This expansion allows the project to take on these greater challenges and increase the tempo of development in 2015, bringing more quality updates to DayZ’s 3,000,000 players.

David Durcak the project lead of DayZ had this to say about the amazing milestone: “We would like to say thank you to every single one of the three million players that have joined us on the journey of making DayZ. You all have helped make DayZ the best open world, zombie survival game. This is an amazing achievement, and we are really looking forward to start sharing with you all of our game design improvements, anti-hack solutions and other optimizations we have been working on for a majority of the last year.”

Considering the amount of issues players still have within DayZ, 3 million sales is an incredible achievement. It makes you wonder how many more sales the game could achieve when it irons out the game and reaches a version worthy of ditching the early access handle.