XA couple weeks after its early access launch, things are going mostly pretty well for the steampunk-mechs-in-the-desert game Sand: Raiders of Sophie. An update that rolled out on July 2 caused some surprise headaches and had to be rolled back, which isn’t great, but on the brighter side the game looks to be a legitimate hit, too.
“300K copies for Sand sold,” Alex Nichiporchik, CEO of publisher TinyBuild, wrote today on X. “We getting [a] half hour of air conditioning tonight!”
The second update for Sand: Raiders of Sophie went live on June 2, but caused connection problems that forced the developers to pull the plug. The plan was to figure out what was happening and redeploy the update later in the week, but fortunately developers were able to get it squared away fairly quickly.
The re-rollout of the new update, and no doubt the coming of the weekend—a long one for gamers in the US—has helped push Sand to its highest concurrent player count yet on Steam at just over 40,000. That’s good enough to put it in the middle of Steam’s 100 most played games chart, between Farming Simulator 25 and Helldivers 2 (PC gaming is so wonderfully diverse) and while it’s nowhere near the six-figure counts of the real big boys, bear in mind that Sand is not free to play—at $20 a pop with its launch discount, that adds up to not a bad little chunk of change.