Free-to-play shooter Warframe has been downloaded one million times on Nintendo Switch

Just three weeks after its Nintendo Switch debut, Warframe has hit one million downloads.

The third-person shooter has already racked up 40 million players across other platforms as a free-to-play product. And it’s far from done yet, with VP of publishing at developer Digital Extremes Meridith Braun telling MCV that active player numbers "more than doubled" last year after the launch of the game’s huge open-world update. It now boasts concurrent player numbers of nearly 132,000, and a concurrent average of around 50,000 players just on PC.

"We were super nervous after being turned down by a lot of the large free-to-play publishers,” Braun admits, continuing: “We were hoping someone would help us publish this originally, and when they didn’t see that this could be a successful product, we ultimately decided to just do this on our own."

There are no purchasable random loot boxes in Warframe, and if you’re buying anything with the in-game currency you know exactly what you’re getting and exactly how much you’re paying. "That was a conscious effort, when we started looking at all the other free-to-play games out there, and primarily most of them started in the east, and seeing the tactics used to just attack someone’s wallet was so gross to us," Braun added.

It has some way to go before it catches up with Epic’s Fortnite. Nintendo recently confirmed that Epic’s fan-favourite battle royale game has "gained so much momentum" that since its release on Switch earlier this year, the game has been downloaded to "nearly half" of all systems worldwide.

Thanks, GamesIndustry.biz.