Something very strange happened during the recently concluded 2024 Steam Summer Sale: Bohemia Interactive's military simulator Arma 3 sold nearly 700,000 units.

The blockbuster hit was first reported by Bohemia on July 16. Welcome to the more than 500,000 new members of the Arma 3 community during the Steam Summer Sale 2024,” said Bohemia. This is the highest number of units sold in a single day since the Arma 3 alpha release in March 2013.”

And that's what makes these sales numbers so unexpected: Arma 3 was released in alpha in March 2013 and fully launched in September of the same year; a game that is over a decade old has achieved sales that would be the envy of any newly released game. [Bohemia Interactive's Pavel Křižka told PC Gamer, “Two big factors were that the base game was very generously discounted (90% the first time) and Arma 3 was featured on the front page of Steam.

“The first time we saw Arma 3 on Steam, we were very impressed,” Pavel Křižka of Bohemia Interactive told PC Gamer, “and even though Arma 3 is over 10 years old, there's still nothing like it for mil-sim game enthusiasts.

Final Arma 3 sales numbers were even higher than Bohemia's Steam announcement suggested; according to Křižka, the base game and DLC sold during the Steam sale totaled 695,000 copies and 196,000 pieces. Incidentally, a previous Steam sale of “Arma 3” sold 249,000 copies, although the game was discounted by 80% and was not advertised on Steam's home page.

Arma 3 also had “excellent sales” during the Steam sale in countries such as Brazil, Turkey, China, and South America; according to Křižka, about 60% of Arma 3's revenue came from the US, followed by the UK, Germany, and France: major gaming markets. and countries with a strong interest in simulating the East-West war in Europe.

According to Křižka, Arma 3 may have also benefited from “synergy” with Arma Reforger, a sort of introductory version of Arma 4 released in 2022. The number of connected players has increased noticeably, and some Redditors have attributed this to the influence of OperatorDrewski, a military game streamer with nearly 2 million YouTube subscribers

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OperatorDrewski posted a video of Arma Reforger in April and was very enthusiastic, despite much criticism of the game. It looks like a lot of fun and the video has been viewed 730,000 times so far.

“It's possible that people who were exposed to Reforger and were looking for more substantial games, mods, and expansions jumped on the Arma 3 sale,” redditor LeetModule suggested.

Interestingly, Arma 3 also saw an increase in concurrent players shortly after the start of the Steam Summer Sale, but it was not significant: according to SteamDB, the peak concurrent player count was just under 17,000 the weekend of June 22, before the sale began, but peak number of concurrent players since then was 22,496.

This lends credence to the simplest explanation for the surge: it's $3, it's listed on Steam's front page, it's listed in the new “Deep Discounts” sale category, and as at least one redditor noted, it's a decade After being on Steam for a year, it's probably on many wish lists. For $3, buy it now, play it when you can, and maybe never play it again. Let's face it, we've all bought games like that at least once in the past.

Whatever the reason, Bohemia welcomed newcomers with a whole bunch of guides to getting started with the game, from “Boot Camp Quick Start” to modding the game to finding the right troops to join. It's a tough read, especially if you're coming into this game expecting a Modern Warfare-like experience, but it's a good idea to at least skim through it: as redditor albatrossSKY said, “To play this game, every key on your keyboard I wonder how many of these people know that they need key assignments”