Bellwright recovers from launch struggle with 200,000 copies sold already

Donkey Crew celebrates a successful release

Donkey Crew

Things looked a little dicey for Bellwright during its Early Access launch in April 2024, which was met with a mixed reception and relatively tame player numbers, but Snail Inc. and Donkey Crew seem to have found the perfect answer to the game’s initial troubles and turned the tide with their quick reactions to feedback: Steam user reviews have averaged out at a solid 7/10 as of right now, marking a sharp upturn from where things started.

According to the developers, over 200,000 copies of the game have been sold since release with player numbers having stabilized at a higher level than at launch. A press release emphasized that “a significant portion of players” was investing “over 20 hours” into the game. Overall the two companies reported “a higher than expected level of player retention” for Bellwright, which bodes well for the future development of the game. Over the last week, the daily concurrent player count peaked between around 8,000 and 10,000 users, which is more than double the launch day’s population.

“The amount of support and enthusiasm from players has been a wonderful surprise for our team so soon after release. As we're gathering feedback and discussing potential features with the community in preparation for our first content update, we have some exciting news on the way about the future of Bellwright and what's coming next,” commented Donkey Crew’s Florian Hofreiter.

Bellwright fuses concepts of open-world survival-crafting games with city-building elements and aspects of the Mount & Blade series, which is a fairly unique mixture on the market.

Our own Bellwright Early Access impressions see a lot of promise in the game, even though it still falls short in the crucial combat area, forcing players to rely on exploiting poor pathfinding to shoot enemies down with arrows in order to avoid the poor melee fighting.