‘Dying Light’ Sets Sales Record, Shows Zombies Are Still Hot

Dying Light has been lauded since its release as one of the best zombie games on the market. It turns out that Dying Light should have been lauded as one of the best new horror series ever. As the U.S. sales charts for January hit the web, the biggest piece of news is that Dying Light has actually set sales records in the horror genre.

“In January 2015, ‘Dying Light’ had the highest first month of sales for new IP in the survival horror genre, exceeding the previous record, ‘The Evil Within,'” stated the NPD Group’s Liam Callahan, according to Eurogamer.

That statistic alone has had to raise eyebrows, considering that The Evil Within was a new offering from a beloved horror video game master, Resident Evil creator Shinji Mikami.

Resident Evil’s HD remake just recently released as well, and while it has done quite well, it doesn’t appear it’s going to come anywhere near the sales numbers that Dying Light posted in January. It should be noted that Dying Light benefitted greatly from not really having to compete with other big name games for players’ attentions. With the big holiday season just ending a few months ago, this is a relatively dead period in the video game release calendar.

Dying Light managed to find a date inside that dead period, which is about to end that let it stand alone for most of the first few weeks of 2015. That’s demonstrated best by the games that followed the Parkour zombie title on the U.S. sales charts. Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, Grand Theft Auto V, Minecraft, and NBA 2K15 round out the top five. Of those other four games, none were released later than mid-November of 2014.

Super Smash Bros. for the Wii U is the last game on the list in the top 10 that was released in 2014, but even it came well before Dying Light hit store shelves. Obviously, if the horror game was not considered to be quality, it still wouldn’t be beating out the other bigwigs on the U.S. Sales charts, so it’s obvious the game has lived up to the hype and was the only new game worth buying in January.

With games like The Order: 1886 and Bloodborne releasing later this month and Evolve hitting stores this past Tuesday, it will be interesting to see where January’s champ will sit on the February charts. It will also be interesting to see if either Bloodborne or The Order can beat Dying Light’s horror game sales record.