Starbound reaches 2.5m units sold

Indie studio Chucklefish has announced that Starbound has reached a new milestone, having sold more than 2.5 million copies over the Christmas break, six months after it officially launch.

The title previously spent two and a half years in Early Access, so there’s a good chance this figure also includes those Early Access purchases, even if Chucklefish hasn’t clarified whether or not that’s the case.

This was announced by community and marketing manager Molly Carroll in a blog post yesterday: 2016 was really huge for us! In July, we finally released Starbound 1.0 after five years of development. Over the Christmas break, we hit another milestone – we’ve sold over 2.5 million copies of Starbound! I’m trying to visualize a crowd of two and a half million people, but I’m struggling. We’ll just go with… that’s a lot of people? That’s a lot of copies! That’s a lot of alpaca suits and Matter Manipulators and dead Poptops."

She also teased Starbound’s new update: Every patch we see loads of comments from the community about what they love about the game and what they want to see more of. This patch, we’re working on fleshing out a part of the game that’s exciting to a lot of us in the office, as well as a lot of you out there: space! We’ve got lots of big plans for this update.”

Starbound was successfully crowdfunded via Chucklefish’s website back in 2013 and then launched on Steam’s Early Access program, very quickly reaching 1m copies sold. It left Early Access last July after spending five years in development in total.