Zero Company has passed a million copies, an analyst estimates, and 70 percent of them are on Steam

Star Wars Zero Company has sold more than a million copies and made about $50 million since its August 27 launch, according to an estimate Alinea Analytics published today. That is a market-data firm's estimate, not a number from EA. EA has not released any sales figure for the game, and Alinea's post does not explain how the estimate was built. Read it as an informed outside guess.

Where the copies went

Alinea splits the copies 69.9 percent Steam, 19.9 percent PlayStation 5 and 10.2 percent Xbox, with the Xbox PC version counted under Xbox. The money splits differently: 59.9 percent Steam, 26.7 percent PS5 and 13.3 percent Xbox. Consoles account for 30.1 percent of copies and 40.1 percent of revenue, which Alinea puts down to regional pricing, since console players pay more per copy. The post covers Steam, PlayStation and Xbox only and does not mention EA's own PC app.

Two more of its numbers stand out. It puts 90 percent of players in North America or Europe and under 5 percent in Asia, and it notes that Chinese reviews on Steam sit at 57 percent positive against 82 percent overall, with many citing the lack of voice-over and localization options.

How it squares with the Steam player counts

If the 69.9 percent is right, Zero Company has sold roughly 700,000 copies on Steam. SteamDB recorded a peak of 77,889 players on launch weekend, so at the busiest moment about one Steam owner in nine was playing at once. Our tracker, which reads Steam every two hours, had Saturday, September 19 topping out at 11,538, about one in sixty, and the overnight low on Friday at 4,452. Week four's numbers have the full slide.

A falling curve and a million sales fit together fine. Zero Company is a single-player campaign of 30 to 40 hours; people buy it, play it hard for a couple of weeks and finish. The Steam-heavy split fits the launch too, when the game topped Steam's global revenue chart for its first week. But concurrent players count who is playing, not who bought, and our tracker sees Steam only, so none of our numbers can confirm Alinea's.

Is a million enough?

Alinea's Rhys Elliott calls about $50 million respectable for a turn-based tactics game in a crowded release window. It is also a gross figure: store fees, the Star Wars licence and EA's share all come out before anything reaches the studio, and none of those terms are public. That matters because Bit Reactor furloughed most of its staff in the weeks before launch. A million copies is a good result for the genre. Whether it is enough to bring that team back is the question EA has not answered, and no DLC or follow-up has been announced.

If you are deciding whether to buy, none of this changes the game. It is a single-player campaign that plays the same with a million owners or ten, and our review still has it at 9 out of 10.

How we count

Alinea's figures are theirs, taken from the post linked above. Our player figures are Steam's public concurrent count, read every two hours, through Sunday morning, September 20. PlayStation and Xbox players are not counted anywhere in our numbers.