Split Fiction, the new co-op action game from Josef Fares and the team at Hazelight Studios, looks to be a hit: Hazelight revealed on Bluesky today that the game surpassed one million copies sold in just 48 hours.
"The love you all show for our game is overwhelming!" the studio wrote. "Everyone here at Hazelight are beyond happy—and we can’t stop enjoying your amazing reactions!"
By way of comparison, Split Fiction's predecessor, It Takes Two—one of the big successes of 2021—took a month to move one million copies. That's quite a difference, and in case you're wondering, no, the speedrun to a million was not the result of people taking advantage of the free Friend's Pass edition of the game, which enables people who don't own the game to play along with someone who does: Electronic Arts confirmed with PC Gamer that the figure represents only full copies of the game sold, and doesn't include Friend's Pass installation.
(Also, It Takes Two has a Friend's Pass too, so there's really no imbalance there.)
As a guess I'd say the big factor in Split Fiction's accelerated timeline is simple expectations. A Way Out, Hazelight's first game, was decent but didn't give anyone reason to expect that It Takes Two would be the surprise hit of 2021 and claim multiple game of the year awards. But it was and it did, and that gave people a reason to pay more attention to Split Fiction, and to jump in right from the start.
The good news for all those early adopters is that Split Fiction seems to be living up to the hype. Via SteamDB, its peak concurrent player count on Steam thus far is 259,000, a massive jump over It Takes Two's peak of 71,039. It's also carrying an "overwhelmingly positive" rating across more than 14,000 user reviews.
