Kingdom Come: Deliverance hits 1m sales

Warhorse Studios' Kingdom Come: Deliverance has sold one million units less than two weeks on from its release.

The milestone was celebrated on Twitter by several members of the Warhorse team, including CEO and founder Daniel Vavra and US community manager Rick Lagnese. Kingdom Come Deliverance was published by Deep Silver, and launched for PC, Xbox One and PlayStation 4 on February 13.

Warhorse was founded in 2011 by Vavra, a veteran of Mafia developer 2K Czech, and Martin Klíma, whose CV includes roles at Codemasters and Bohemia Interactive. The studio committed to using CryEngine for a still unnamed project back in 2012, and that project was revealed to be Kingdom Come: Deliverance in January 2014.

A successful Kickstarter campaign raised £1.1 million, far above the £300,000 target Warhorse wanted to attract further investment. Warhorse continued to crowdfund money through its own website, and had released alpha and beta versions of the game by the time it signed a publishing deal with Deep Silver in September 2016.

Kingdom Come has been in some stage of development for almost seven years, then, and it has attracted good reviews in addition to its strong commercial performance. The PC release of the game currently has a Metacritic average of 75, which is markedly better than both of the console versions - 68 on PlayStation 4 and 67 on Xbox One.

At Devcom last year, Vavra discussed the potential for indies to compete with AAA games on a limited budget, by using the right tools and ensuring the creative vision doesn't lose focus. At the time, he suggested that the budget for Kingdom Come was less than $10 million, but it is pitched at the same audience as CD Projekt's The Witcher 3, which had a total budget of $81 million.

"You can do AAA games [for much less] nowadays," he said. "If I were making a first-person shooter... $5m to $6m and I can compete with Call of Duty. If you add $50m for marketing, of course."