The Week on Steam: Early Access Proves Its Point, and an Industry Feels the Axe

Two numbers defined the week's commercial story: Train 45 crossed 100,000 copies sold in seven days with over 1,000 Overwhelmingly Positive reviews, and Sand: Raiders of Sophie reported more than 300,000 copies sold in roughly the same window after launch. Neither is a tentpole release. Both are early access bets that paid out. Sex, Secrets & Used Tech added a third data point — 120,000 copies in its first week. The week's quieter argument was that the mid-tier is not dead.

The Patch That Stumbled and the One That Delivered

Sand: Raiders of Sophie had a rougher road. An update deployed mid-week caused widespread connection failures and had to be rolled back within hours; the studio redeployed a corrected version later in the week. It is a familiar early access rhythm — ship, break, fix, ship again — but the player count absorbed it. Pax Dei, meanwhile, delivered its R47 content patch with considerably more stability: huntable birds, a reworked archery and fletching system, new bows, an achievement framework, and the first stage of a permissions overhaul. For a game still finding its identity, R47 reads as a week of genuine foundation-laying.

One Studio's Infrastructure, Now Public

On July 1, Fenris Creations — formerly CCP Games — completed the full open-source release of its Carbon Engine, the technology underlying EVE Online and EVE Frontier, with repositories now available on GitHub. Studios open-sourcing proprietary engines is uncommon enough to mark; doing so after decades of in-house development is rarer still.

The Weight of Layoffs

ZeniMax Online Studios, developer of Elder Scrolls Online, was reported to have been hit hard by Xbox's latest round of layoffs, with senior talent gone and roadmaps described as shifting as a result. ESO itself continued its scheduled content work — Season One, launching July 8, was announced to include a new Thieves Guild questline — but the gap between a studio's public calendar and its internal condition was made visible this week in an uncomfortable way.

Elsewhere on the Platform

Paralives pushed patch 0.1.5 with a meaningful quality-of-life revision: save files dropping from a 500MB average to 30MB, multiple autosave versions, and Steam Cloud sync. Cyberpunk 2077 passed 40 million copies sold across all platforms and editions. Age of Empires IV introduced automatic monthly ranked map pool rotations. Once Human announced a first-person mode, responding to what the studio described as consistent player demand since launch.

With ESO's Season One scheduled to go live on July 8, next week opens on ZeniMax's terms — and under considerable scrutiny.