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We already know that Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 was a big hit for developer Warhorse Studios. The game vaulted over one million sales on its first day of launch, before galloping toward two million copies sold by the end of February. But how does that compare to the performance of the original game? It seems safe to say it’s done better, but how much better?
A specific answer was provided by Mat Piscatella, executive director of industry analysis firm Circana. Sharing market highlights from the US for February 2025, Piscatella revealed that Warhorse’s sequel has shifted five times the number of copies of the original.
“The launch month dollar sales total Kingdom Come: Deliverance II reached in February 2025 was more than 5 times higher than that the original Kingdom Come: Deliverance achieved during its February 2018 debut,” Piscatella wrote on BlueSky. This makes Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 the second best-selling premium game in the US, behind only the colossal commercial beast that is Monster Hunter Wilds.
It is worth stressing that these figures are US specific, so the ratio might not be the same globally. Nonetheless, it demonstrates how successfully Warhorse built upon the foundations of the original Kingdom Come: Deliverance.
What exactly is the secret behind KCD2’s success? You could point to all manner of things, like its incredible quest design, which rivals the likes of The Witcher 3 and Baldur’s Gate 3 for how they take players on long, winding journeys, turning even the smallest, most incidental-seeming errand into a strange, sweeping adventure. Players have also clearly chimed with its Oblivion-ass NPC behaviours, which often flows in and out of those quests, making its moment-to-moment play both endearingly unpredictable and highly memorable.
Yet I think we can gain a more specific insight from looking at both KCD 2 and Monster Hunter Wilds. Together, they demonstrate that players have a real appetite for rich, systems-driven games that have the capacity to completely immerse you in their worlds, but don’t necessarily spoon feed their ideas. Granted, Monster Hunter: Wilds is designed to be the most accessible of the bunch, but it’s still a game with a vast, gnomic depths once you get beyond the introductory campaign.
Certainly, in the case of Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, its slower pace and more demanding design were very much deliberate choices. Warhorse openly explained that it was designed to avoid the ‘instant gratification’ of modern games, citing examples like Morrowind and Oblivion as direct influences on its approach.
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Kurt Indovina
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