ArmA 2 mod DayZ has over 420,000 players

DayZ creator Dean Hall has said the ArmA 2 mod has over 420,000 people playing it.

Speaking with Eurogamer during Rezzed, Hall, a multiplayer designer for Bohemia Interactive, said yesterday, July 6, the game has 400,000 folks playing it, and he expects 430,000 players by July 8 and half a million by next week.

"Currently we're running 22,000 concurrent at full peak, and 10,000 off peak, which is pretty huge numbers considering the original data structure and system was designed to handle 100 concurrents, and two servers," Hall said during his developer session.

"We now have 1000 servers. We're getting 110,000 players in a 24 hour period at the moment."

Hall said the popularity of the mod forced the migration of servers six times, and five were lost to overheating. Each upgrade also causes a server crash.

"We have trouble telling the difference between a DDoS and whether some YouTube channel has posted a video of the game," Hall said. "It makes things pretty interesting."

Hall said he would like to see DayZ turned into a , but at the moment However, for now, players will have to be sated with the addition of dogs to the game - possibly German Shepherds - and implementation which has been on the back burner for a while.

"There's a problem with the implementation and there's been so much more that's been more pressing," Hall said, adding that he would like to eventually see DayZ turned into a standalone game, maybe even free-to-play.