Conan Exiles sells 320,000 copies in a week, Funcom releases dev kit for modders

It's been a big first week for Early Access survival sandbox Conan Exiles, and in a post today on its official dev blog Funcom reports that 320,000 copies have already been sold and that "all development costs have been recouped." That's certainly an encouraging start, particularly for a developer that laid off half its staff as recently as 2012.

"Funcom has gone through some challenging times in recent years," the post reads, "and seeing the game we have poured so much time and effort into gain this amount of traction so quickly is very invigorating for everyone who works here. This is just the start of the Early Access adventure and we will do whatever it takes to make sure Conan Exiles turns into a fully-fledged game that has something to offer new and old fans of both Conan and survival games."

In other good news, Funcom has released a dev kit for Exiles, which will allow players to get busy creating mods for the game. Mods will be available in the Steam Workshop, and to get started you're invited to "head over to UnrealEngine.com and download the Unreal launcher to access the dev kit."

Meanwhile, Funcom is still working to get official servers back online. They are launching new ones and trying to restore the original servers which contain the buildings, items, and progress of the players who initially used them. Those servers hit a snag, however, and it sounds like it may take additional time to restore them. From a post on the Exiles Steam community page:

"We could fix that by simply wiping the databases clean, but that would mean those of you who played on those servers would lose all your belongings and all your progress. As such, we have decided to bring those servers down again and our coders are now working hard on fixing that issue so we can bring them up again as soon as possible—with all your items and all your progress intact."

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.