Zero Company has passed a million, and this time the number comes from EA. The EA Star Wars account posted at 11:02am Central today: "Over one million operators and counting! THANK YOU for supporting STAR WARS Zero Company." The same post says patch 1.2 "will release next week." We read the post as relayed by GamingBolt and RPG Site, both of which report it as a million copies sold.
The estimate looks right
On September 22 we covered Alinea Analytics' estimate that the game had passed a million copies, and we called it an informed outside guess because EA had given no figure. EA's own number now lines up with it, if "operators" means buyers, which is how every outlet we read has taken it. EA has not said so in as many words.
That is all EA has confirmed. Its post gives no revenue, no split by platform and no date the line was crossed, and it counts "operators" rather than saying "copies," although every outlet we read has taken it as sales. Alinea's figures of about $50 million gross and roughly 70 percent of copies on Steam are still Alinea's, not EA's.
The other hard sales signal this week came from Circana. Its US chart for August, published Thursday, put Zero Company fifth for the month, from a tracking window (August 2 to 29) that held only three days of its sales.
Patch 1.2: a date, no notes
EA has said nothing about what 1.2 contains. There are no patch notes, no platforms and no day beyond "next week." The game's last full patch was 1.1 on September 9, and since then there has been one PC-only hotfix on September 28, with a one-sentence note about crashes "for various hardware setups." Console players are still on 1.1. Whether 1.2 reaches consoles, or touches the Intel 13th and 14th generation crashes that were still on EA's known-issues list after that hotfix, is unknown until the notes are out.
Some of Bit Reactor is back at work
On Wednesday, Stephen Totilo at Game File reported that the studio has started returning furloughed staff to work. Bit Reactor CEO Greg Foertsch said in a statement: "This week, we started the process of returning more of our team back to work at Bit Reactor." How many is Game File's reporting, not the studio's: a person familiar with the situation said payrolled headcount is back to "more than half" of what it was before the furloughs. Game File adds that a fair number are still without pay. EA has not commented that we can find.
On Steam, the game has settled low
At 3:47pm Central today our tracker had Zero Company at 3,352 players on Steam. In our month-one piece, the Sunday peaks ran from 75,825 on launch weekend to 7,524 on September 27. Today's afternoon reading is 4.4 percent of the first and 45 percent of the second, though up 17 percent on Wednesday's 2,865 at a similar hour. Last Sunday afternoon we read 5,169. Steam only; console and EA app players are in none of these numbers.
Buy now or wait for 1.2?
Zero Company is still $49.99 on Steam, its launch price, and EA has not discounted it there once. It is a single-player campaign that our review scores 9 out of 10, and player counts change nothing about a mission.
If you were holding off for proof the game would be supported, today is the best evidence yet: a confirmed sales figure, staff returning and a dated patch. If you are on PC with a 13th or 14th generation Intel chip, wait the week and read the 1.2 notes first; until EA says otherwise, the workaround in our crash-fix guide is still the plan. Everyone else can buy now. 1.2 will download either way.
