New Early Access game Robocraft rockets past 1m players

Free-to-play multiplayer shooter Robocraft has surpassed one million registered players.

The game, described as a mash-up between Minecraft and World of Tanks, is still in alpha and has just been released on Steam Early Access. Though the title has been available prior to its Steam release, Freejam game director Mark Simmons told Develop that releasing the title on the digital store has resulted in a significant jump in players.

“We jumped from 20,000 users per day, to 100,000 users per day, pretty much overnight,” said Simmons.

“From 2,500 online fighting at the same time dropping lower in early morning to 12,000 users online fighting 24/7. Lets just say we’ve been doing a lot of fire-fighting over the last few weeks to keep the servers coping, but we’re on top of it now.”

In April the game amassed reached 300,000 players, which means in nearly four months Robocraft has attracted an extra 700,000 users, 175,000 per month on average.

Simmons said that bringing the game to Early Access meant the team could grow the player base and continue experimenting with game mechanics and features based on community feedback, with the full release at least six months away.

“We felt by going on Early Access the Steam community would be more comfortable with the changes to the game mechanics as we try things out,” he said.

“We are still adding some missing features we regard as the ‘core’, and when those are complete we’ll call it ‘beta’. Then we’ll polish and gun for a full release on Steam. That’s all at least six months, but we don’t plan much at Freejam, we iterate as fast as we can and build with the community and we see where that takes us.”

He added: “The task gets harder now as we’re not just this little game that nobody’s heard of but instead we’re a slightly bigger game that a few people have heard of so we need to consistently deliver exciting new features and content to keep all those users perpetually engaged and to allow us to continue to grow.”