Space Marine 2 Didn't Need To Sell 4 Million Units To Be A Success, But It Did Anyway

Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 publisher Focus Entertainment has revealed that 4.5 million units of the Saber Interactive-developed game have been sold since it launched last month. An impressive sales figure on its own, this ties into recent comments made by Saber's chief creative officer Tim Willits regarding how many units the game needed to sell to be successful.

"We don't need to sell 4 million units to make it [Space Marine 2] a success," Willits said earlier this month. "There are many games, sadly, especially out of North American developers, where if you do not sell 5 million copies you are a failure. I mean, what business are we in where you fail if you sell less than 5 million?"

Space Marine 2 earned positive reviews when it first launched and more than 2 million players answered the Astartes call on Steam alone. In comparison, other games with big IPs and even bigger development budgets like Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League and Star Wars Outlaws have had disappointing launches, according to their respective publishers.

While it's primarily a single-player game, Space Marine 2 also has PvE and PvP modes for players to explore after they wrap up the campaign. A new patch for the game went live this week, adding a new difficulty mode, a photo mode, and a substantial amount of fine-tuning.

A lot of these changes have been met with negative reception by fans, as Update 4.0 adjusted the perfect parry window for fencing weapons, nerfed the basic Auspex Scan, and the changes made to the difficulty modes in Operations have been called out by players as being brutally unfair.

The game is currently being review-bombed on Steam over these perceived nerfs, and Focus Entertainment says it'll introduce balancing fixes next week to address player feedback. "We closely read your feedback regarding the latest patch for Space Marine 2 and we're actively working on another one including balancing fixes," Focus wrote in an X / Twitter post. "It should release next week."

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