Dawn of War: Definitive Edition sold 150,000 copies in its first day

A squiggoth rampages through an ork encampment

(Image credit: Relic)

What's the audience like for a light-touch remaster of a 21-year-old RTS? Especially one that's being sold for full price? (Though owners of the original do get a 30% launch discount, to be fair.) Turns out, it's pretty decent. As Relic boasted on Twitter, Dawn of War's remaster sold 150,000 copies in less than 24 hours.

I've been trying to convince people to play Dawn of War for years, but always had to do so with caveats. For starters, the base game needed tweaking to run on modern operating systems, and there were four different versions available thanks to its "expandalone" release model—if you were a fan of a particular army added in a later pack, like the necrons or Sisters of Battle, you'd have to navigate those. If you wanted the best singleplayer campaign then you'd want Dark Crusade, but if you wanted to go hog wild with mods you'd be better off with Soulstorm. And so on.

Having a single version with all the factions and all four campaigns makes things a lot easier for someone looking to get into Dawn of War today. And the relatively minor graphical upgrade means the dialogue scenes still look as goofy as they did in 2004, so you're really getting the OG experience.

I'm barreling through the first campaign right now and having an absolute blast. It's reminded me how much I miss the classic model of singleplayer RTS campaign, where it's all about throwing a big mob against someone's defenses until they crumble, listening to generals say something serious, then doing it all again only with a twist.

No modern RTS has managed to recreate that pleasantly bombastic formula, though maybe when I've finished a few campaigns of Dawn of War—eldar Dark Crusade next, I think—I'll be interested in a new take on the genre. We'll see if those 150,000 other players, and everyone else who jumps on board the best RTS of 2004 and 2025 so far, agree.

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Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.

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