Steam smash hit Content Warning has sold over 700,000 copies after giving away 6 million free copies

I imagine all game developers get butterflies in their stomachs when they're about to push their game live, but it's not often a game previously given away for free suddenly starts asking for money. That was the deal indie studio Landfall made with players when it surprise-released Content Warning on April Fools' day.

The Lethal Company-like horror game that challenges friends to record scary videos and go viral on SpöökTube would be free to claim for its first 24 hours, after which Landfall would start charging $8. Over six million copies of Content Warning were claimed during the free period, a response that Landfall CEO Wilhelm Nylund tells PC Gamer was «completely unlike anything» they've experienced.

Landfall has created its own holiday around making gag games that go viral (April 1 is «Landfall Day» at the company), so Content Warning's success wasn't a total surprise. In 2018, the studio took a break from developing Totally Accurate Battle Simulator to make Totally Accurate Battlegrounds, a parody battle royale spinoff that was so popular the studio ended up supporting it for years. Nylund said the team was ready for something similar to happen with Content Warning, but they were still caught off guard by how many people flocked to the game immediately.

«It felt likely that [Content Warning] would be bigger than any of our similar small projects, but we definitely didn't expect it to happen so quickly,» Nylund told PC Gamer in an interview this week. «It was definitely a lot of excitement and a lot of confusion about how it blew up as quickly as it did.»

Those six million day one copies blew Landfall's biggest expectations out of the water, but it also made the team slightly nervous that nobody would be interested in picking it up once the $8 price tag kicked in.

«We all had this feeling that there's so much at stake tonight when the game goes paid.»

The price change happened the morning of April 2, and Nylund immediately started refreshing their sales figure