Focus Entertainment Sees Record Launch for Space Marine 2 With Advanced Access

The trend of offering more expensive game editions with multi-day Advanced Access has also paid off for Focus Entertainment. The French publisher has outperformed all of its previous releases with Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 - and that's just with Advanced Access, as the regular version won't be released until 9 September 2024.

Becoming increasingly popular are games with Advanced Access. This is not the classic Early Access, but means that end-customers buy a certain edition of the game in order to be able to play it a few days earlier. Both World of Warcraft: The War Within and Star Wars Outlaws both offered this option. Focus Entertainment also made two editions of Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 available with several days of Advanced Access. Buyers of the Gold Edition (€89.99) and the Ultra Edition (€99.99) were able to start on the evening of 5 September. The Standard Edition (€59.99) is scheduled for release on 9 November.

For Focus Entertainment, this approach has paid off handsomely, as the Advanced Access period for Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 attracted more concurrent players on Steam than any other game ever released by the French publisher. A total of 134,302 players logged on to the game from Saber Interactive (World War Z) during the Advanced Access period. That's over 95,000 more than the previous CCU record holders Atomic Heart (38,469) and My Time at Sandrock (21,778) - and that's in a release heavy environment, while Black Myth: Wukong continues to see daily CCU peaks of over a million. The CCU peak is a new record for Saber Interactive as well. Of the Warhammer games, only Total War: Warhammer III had a higher CCU peak on Steam (166,754). The Warhammer 40,000 game with the highest CCU peak to date was Warhammer 40,000: Darktide (108,395).

Speaking of Advanced Access from French companies: Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown also launched yesterday in paid Advanced Access, with the 79.99 Euro Gold Edition going on sale a week earlier. Designed as a Massively Open Online Racing game with a permanent online connection, the game suffered for hours from server problems that KT Racing and Nacon couldn't get under control until 13 hours after launch - which is reflected in the user reviews on Steam. The CCU peak was 4,300 on Steam at 19:00 yesterday. So Advanced Access was working, but the game's servers weren't.