Nine hours after Early Access opened, Bulkhead put the number on the Steam news hub: 1.25 million
copies sold. The post is four lines long and most of it is an apology — Thank you for your
patience. Apologies for the delays.
— which is a fair summary of how the first evening went for
the people trying to get in.
The numbers, and which is which
Two concurrent figures are circulating and both are real.
- 337,157 is the peak for 10 September, the calendar day Early Access opened at 16:00 UTC.
- 340,171 is the peak for the run as a whole, set at 00:40 UTC on 11 September — forty minutes after midnight, while the game was still filling up. It is the highest count this site has read from Steam's own endpoint, and SteamDB's chart puts the record at the same figure on the same day.
For scale: Closed Beta 02, six days earlier, peaked at 244,926 on the playtest application, and the first Closed Beta reached 105,774 in August. A million Steam wishlists were announced on 13 August; the first day converted more than that count into sales, which is not the usual direction of that ratio.
The queue ended before the announcement did
The sales post went up at 01:05 UTC. An hour before it, the studio said the queue issues should have passed; by 23:00 UTC it had counted 135,000 players through the queue and in game, still admitting people in waves and watching whether the servers held. Launch Stability Hotfix #1 at 20:20 UTC is what turned that corner, at the cost of putting everyone who was already playing back in the queue behind it.
Three faults from the evening outlived the queue and are still worth having answers to: error 1628505091 on joining a server, the incorrect-ban wave that printed "Access denied - No license found", and failed to authenticate at the front of the queue. The live tracker is where the next patch day gets watched.