If you are not afraid of the dark and are chasing that mil-sim high, this is your calling to get on the Gray Zone Warfare train.

After a shaky launch in April this year, Madfinger Games put the game back on track with the massive Night Ops update.

Gray Zone Warfare took a risky gamble, mixing the most punishing aspects of extraction shooters like Escape From Tarkov with the slow-paced open-world gameplay most recently seen in ARMA Reforger. To the developers’ credit, this gamble paid off.

Despite angling for a niche within a niche, Gray Zone Warfare just reached the 1,000,000 sales mark this month.

According to Madfinger, these account for a million copies of the base game, and another 500,000 in sales of edition upgrades.

The Tactical Shooter Renaissance

Having such a complex and arguably unfriendly title meet such numbers may come as a surprise considering how Gray Zone Warfare is far from a household name, but it is part of what many gamers are hoping to be a tactical shooter renaissance.

The only franchise to stay relevant in this genre from the 2000s until today is ARMA, where the modding scene for ARMA 3 helped push through the slump until ARMA Reforger matured.

Squad, a standalone game that evolved from the Battlefield 2 mod pack “Project Reality”, has been kicking since 2015, but it took 7 years to break the 3 million sales mark. Two years later, it sits at around 5 million copies sold, with the highest Steam player count in its history.

The success is not restricted to large-scale games with colossal maps though.

A lot of the looting and extraction mechanics seen in Gray Zone Warfare became popular in the Russian toxic-yet-addictive game Escape From Tarkov.

According to Battlestate Games director Ludmila Lipskaya in a financial report released in October of this year, the game welcomed over 1,100,000 million new players in 2023.

Originally intended as an open-world title, Battlestate Games settled for smaller, separate maps due to technical limitations.

On an even smaller scale, the success of Ready Or Not is worth noting. According to a developer interview with Ryan Rigney of Push To Talk, Ready Or Not sold over 5,100,000 copies between 2021 and 2024.

This is a gritty game with relatively few levels, small maps, and extremely unforgiving mechanics, but that is part of the charm.

Six Days in Fallujah, released against all odds in 2023 via Victura after Konami dropped the game in 2009, has drawn comparisons with Ready Or Not and earned similar praise for the immersion and brutality of the gameplay.

After many years, it becomes easier to forgive Rainbow Six Siege for going down the arcade route, or Ghost Recon Breakpoint for chasing awkward futurism. The shooter ecosystem is healing, so stay frosty.