Somehow, the 11-year-old niche mil-sim Arma 3 managed to sell nearly 700,000 copies during the Steam Summer Sale

A very strange thing happened during the recently-concluded 2024 Steam Summer Sale: Almost 700,000 copies of Bohemia Interactive's military simulator Arma 3 were sold, an astounding figure that includes the game's biggest single-day sales figure ever.

The runaway sales success was first reported by Bohemia on July 16. «Welcome to the over 500,000 new recruits that have joined the Arma 3 community during the Steam Summer Sale 2024!» the studio wrote in a welcome-to-the-club message on Steam. «Close to 100,000 of you joined us during the sale's first day—the highest number of copies sold in a single day dating all the way back to the initial Arma 3 Alpha release in March 2013!»

And that's what makes the sales number so unexpected: Arma 3 has been around for more than 10 years, debuting as a public alpha in March 2013 before rolling into full launch in September of the same year. How does a game more than a decade old put up sales figures that would be the envy of a brand-new release?

«The two biggest factors were definitely a very generous discount of the base game (90% for the first time) and that Arma 3 was featured at the Steam front page,» Bohemia Interactive's Pavel Křižka told PC Gamer. «But no doubt it's also about the uniqueness of the whole Arma platform. Despite Arma 3 being more than 10 years old, there still nothing quite like it available for mil-sim game lovers.»

The final Arma 3 sales numbers were even higher than Bohemia's Steam announcement suggested. Křižka said a total of 695,000 copies of the base game were sold during the Steam sale, along with 196,000 pieces of DLC. By way of comparison, the previous Arma 3 sale on Steam, during which the game was discounted by 80% and was not promoted on the Steam home page, saw «just» 249,000 copies sold—which, I have to be honest, strikes me as pretty damn good in its own right.

Arma 3 also saw «great sales» in countries including Brazil, Turkey, and China, as well as throughout South America, during the Steam