Dying Light hit its fifth anniversary last week. The game launched in 2015, in the Q1 release window that no other game would even consider. It smashed sales records because it had no competition, established a huge fan base, and now it’s one of the most popular zombie fighting RPGs out there. To celebrate the milestone, developer Techland put out a new trailer for the game, as well as a story mode difficulty that makes it easier to complete. Seeing this trailer, I thought it would be good to go through those stats as I did for Gran Turismo Sport, and see what kind of madness we can come up with.
Five Years On
I think that one of the most important stats to take into account here is the fact that Techland has supported Dying Light with new, meaningful updates for five whole years. Most developers provide enough support to keep a game functional after the first year, but apart from that they generally leave it as it is unless it’s an MMO. Dying Light really was a trend-setter in this way, with the developers responding to the needs of the community, and the community getting even stronger because of it.
The game has hosted over 30 community events, each of which has been different, as well as three game crossovers. What’s astounding is that there are now 18 million players in Dying Light. To put that into perspective, the first country with less than 18 million people in their entire population is Guatemala with 17,915,568. The country is number 66 out of a total list of 235 countries, which I think is pretty good going in terms of a game’s player population.
In total 575 player-created maps have been made and distributed. This is an insane amount of new maps, and it just shows how many people care about having new content in the game, which is made even more crazy when you consider that Techland still support the game with new features on a regular basis. The game has even hosted a wedding proposal, which is something so brilliant that it must be celebrated.
Now we’re into the nitty gritty. Over 36 billion zombies have been killed in Dying Light. At the beginning of the year, there were 7.7 billion humans on planet Earth. That number represents four total extinctions of the human race, with an extra half leftover for good luck.
On top of that, 2.2 billion miles have been travelled in the game. That’s farther than the distance between Earth and Jupiter. In fact, that’s just over the distance that the Cassini spacecraft did in order to reach Saturn. That spacecraft took years to get to the huge ringed world, and it wowed the entire planet. This distance being made in Dying Light is made even more amazing when you know that it was mostly made on foot, since vehicles weren’t introduced for a while in the game.
584 million hours have been played in Dying Light in the past five years. To put that into perspective, just 1 million hours is equal to 114 years, 66 days, 3 hours, and 15 minutes. That means that more than 584 million lifetimes have been lived in Dying Light, providing we all live to 100 years-old. In total, that’s 66,621 years. That’s too many years.
