How Did This 5 Year Old Survival Game Just Became a Best-Seller?

The games industry is full of surprises — and sometimes, that can extend to smaller titles finding an entirely new audience half a decade after they launched. Such is the case of Icarus, an online multiplayer game that debuted in the final weeks of 2021. The sci-fi survival game was a solid success when it launched, but quickly seemed to peter out, with a loyal but relatively limited player base keeping it afloat amid occasional content releases.

Now, however, Icarus has found new life. The game sold just shy of a million copies through Steam during December, and the player count for January has been even more impressive. It’s a shocking turn for a game that had been overshadowed in the years since it was released and a pleasant surprise for the developers at RocketWerkz. Given the success of Icarus, it’s worth looking at what helped turn the title into a major hit, and what it says about the larger industry.

Steam’s Winter Sale Brought Icarus Into The Spotlight

The Steam Winter Sale towards the end of 2025 was a boon for players and developers alike, with games like Slay the Spire finding renewed interest thanks to the record-low prices used as a selling point for anyone who previously missed the game. A similar surge happened for Icarus, turning the five-year-old game into a major hit over the holiday break. Developed by RocketWerkz, the PvE survival game from one of the developers of 2012’s DayZ was a bold move. Initially starting out as a mod for Arma 2 before growing into a unique release, Icarus focuses on a distant world that has been radically transformed by terraforming. Players take on missions and head into a dangerous environment searching for specific samples that can be brought back to Earth and sold at a high price.

The multiplayer survival game had been a modest success when it launched in 2021 and had retained a consistent player base since then. Ordinarily selling for $35.00, the game’s price was slashed to $3.50 for the sale. This led to a massive upswing in purchases. At the time of launch, Icarus had over 52,000 concurrent players on Steam. However, that number had dropped significantly by even a month later, with a concurrent player count closer to 8,000. While free-to-play weekends helped raise the player counts here and there, none of it compares to the surge the game received after it went on sale for $3.50 as part of the Steam Winter Sale. Before the sale, Icarus had a peak number of just over 9,000 concurrent players in November. That number jumped to over 35,000 in December and has only continued to rise in January, although things have started to cool off a bit. According to developer Dean Hall, Icarus sold 984,000 copies of the base game during the sale. The success even extended to the DLC, with 243,000 players also purchasing the extra content.

The Benefit Of Having Older Games On Modern Platforms

The success of Icarus is another reminder that gaming is an industry where success can come from the most unexpected places, and even somewhat more obscure titles can become best-sellers under the right circumstances. That’s not to say Icarus had been forgotten; it still had a consistent number of monthly players. However, it wasn’t earning the kind of attention or sales that it did through the Steam Sale. The game, which has some core elements in common with other recent hits (like the extraction shooter, ARC Raiders), might have also benefited from current players seeing it as a fresh take on a genre they’ve been enjoying.

This is just the latest proof that older games have a great deal of potential to become resurgent hits in the modern day. As a result, simply delisting them or making them unavailable to players is a bad move on the part of publishers, especially in an era of digital platforms and online stores where players can discover something new in a sale, revisit an old favorite, or take part in an older game becoming a modern hit. Having a wide breadth that represents the larger history of gaming would seem like a no-brainer, especially if the platforms can put them on sale and let them develop a more natural following.

However, there are plenty of games that are almost impossible to acquire in the current market outside of using outdated technology or brushing up against legal barriers in the world of emulators. While it might be only five years old, Icarus finding massive success half a decade after it debuted — a veritable lifetime in the world of gaming — should be a reminder to everyone that strong design (and the right circumstances) can bring the spotlight back onto a game that had been more or less moved beyond. If publishers want to keep unearthing old games for fans and letting them turn hidden gems into new hits, then they should take inspiration from the success of Icarus and let older titles flourish in current digital markets.