Somehow, the 11-year-old niche mil-sim Arma 3 managed to sell nearly 700,000 copies during the Steam Summer Sale

A very strange thing happened during the recently-concluded 2024 Steam Summer Sale: Almost 700,000 copies of Bohemia Interactive's military simulator Arma 3 were sold, an astounding figure that includes the game's biggest single-day sales figure ever.

The runaway sales success was first reported by Bohemia on July 16. "Welcome to the over 500,000 new recruits that have joined the Arma 3 community during the Steam Summer Sale 2024!" the studio wrote in a welcome-to-the-club message on Steam. "Close to 100,000 of you joined us during the sale's first day—the highest number of copies sold in a single day dating all the way back to the initial Arma 3 Alpha release in March 2013!"

And that's what makes the sales number so unexpected: Arma 3 has been around for more than 10 years, debuting as a public alpha in March 2013 before rolling into full launch in September of the same year. How does a game more than a decade old put up sales figures that would be the envy of a brand-new release?

"The two biggest factors were definitely a very generous discount of the base game (90% for the first time) and that Arma 3 was featured at the Steam front page," Bohemia Interactive's Pavel Křižka told PC Gamer. "But no doubt it's also about the uniqueness of the whole Arma platform. Despite Arma 3 being more than 10 years old, there still nothing quite like it available for mil-sim game lovers."

The final Arma 3 sales numbers were even higher than Bohemia's Steam announcement suggested. Křižka said a total of 695,000 copies of the base game were sold during the Steam sale, along with 196,000 pieces of DLC. By way of comparison, the previous Arma 3 sale on Steam, during which the game was discounted by 80% and was not promoted on the Steam home page, saw "just" 249,000 copies sold—which, I have to be honest, strikes me as pretty damn good in its own right.

Arma 3 also saw "great sales" in countries including Brazil, Turkey, and China, as well as throughout South America, during the Steam Sale, "which are not traditionally our strongest markets," Křižka said. The US accounts for roughly 60% of the revenues generated by Arma 3, according to Křižka, followed by the UK, Germany, and France: Major gaming markets, and also countries that might understandably have a more pointed interest in a simulated East vs West war in Europe.

Křižka said Arma 3 may have also benefited from a "synergistic effect" with Arma Reforger, a sort of introductory version of the still-unseen Arma 4 that was released in 2022. While it's nowhere near as popular as Arma 3, Reforger has seen a notable uptick in concurrent players in recent months, a bump some redditors attributed to OperatorDrewski, a military game streamer with nearly two million subscribers on YouTube. 

OperatorDrewski posted an Arma Reforger video in April that, despite numerous criticisms of the game, was very enthusiastic; he also said Arma Reforger is "booming right now," and has tripled its population since January. It looks like a ton of fun, and the video has thus far accrued 730,000 views. 

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"I guess it’s possible for people that got introduced to Reforger and were looking for a more fleshed out game, mods, and expansions hopped on the Arma 3 sale," redditor LeetModule suggested.

Interestingly, while Arma 3 also enjoyed a bump in concurrent player numbers immediately after the start of the Steam Summer Sale, it hasn't been huge. On the weekend of June 22, before the start of the same, the peak concurrent player count was just a hair under 17,000, according to SteamDB; the peak concurrent player count since then was 22,496.

That lends credence to the simplest explanation for the bump: It's $3, it's on the front page of Steam, it's also featured in the new "Deep Discounts" sale category, and as at least one redditor noted, after being on Steam for 10 years it's probably on a whole lot of wishlists. For three bucks, hey, you buy it now, you get around to it when you can—and maybe you just don't get around to it ever. Let's be honest, we've all made that kind of game purchase at least once in the past.

Whatever the reason, Bohemia made a point of welcoming newcomers with a roundup of guides to getting into the game, covering everything from a "Boot Camp Quickstart" to modding the game and a guide on how to find a good unit to join. It's a lot to take in, especially if you're coming into it expecting something akin to a Modern Warfare experience, but probably a good idea to at least browse through it: As redditor albatrossSKY put it, "I wonder how many of these people know that you need to have a key assignment for every key on your fucking keyboard to play this game?"