Every game developer feels sick to their stomach when trying to release a game, but it's not often that a game that has been distributed for free suddenly starts asking for money. When indie studio Landfall made a surprise release of "Content Warning" on April Fool's Day, the deal they offered players was this.

This Lethal Company-like horror game, which challenges friends to record scary videos and make them go viral on SpöökTube, is billed for free for the first 24 hours, after which Landfall begins charging $8. During the free period, Content Warning was billed for over 6 million units, and Landfall CEO Wilhelm Nylund told PC Gamer that the response was "unlike anything I've ever experienced before."

Landfall has made its own holidays by creating gag games that go viral (the company designates April 1 as "Landfall Day"), so Content Warning's success was not a complete surprise; in 2018, the studio announced the release of Totally Accurate Battle Simulator and created the parody battle royale spinoff Totally Accurate Battlegrounds; Nylund said the team was ready for something similar to happen with Content Warning But even so, he said, they were caught off guard by how many people immediately flocked to the game.

"We felt that Content Warning had the potential to be bigger than any of the similar small projects, but we didn't think it would happen this quickly," Nylund told PC Gamer in an interview this week.

"We've been working on it for a while now," Nylund told PC Gamer.

Six million copies on day one blew away Landfall's biggest expectations, but also gave the team some concern that no one would be willing to pick it up if it cost $8.

"We all had this feeling that so much was at stake tonight when the game went to pay.

The price change occurred on the morning of April 2, and Nyland immediately began updating the sales figures page. For the first few hours, the numbers were reassuring." It was like, "It's okay, it's okay, it's safe."

The numbers were "very good,"

and "very good.

On the first day, "Content Warning" sold over 100,000 copies, "many times" the number that "Landfall" sold in one day. The next day was even stronger: 125,000 copies. Within a week, it had surpassed 700,000 copies. Almost two weeks later, "Content Warning" is still at the top of Steam's sales rankings, sometimes ahead of "Call of Duty," "Destiny" and "Apex Legends".

Despite the risky move for sales numbers, Nylund attributes Content Warning's huge breakthrough in part to its initial free hours.

"People woke up one day and all of a sudden there were tons of images of new games. I think it created a perception that, 'Oh, this is something worth paying attention to. This is something that's happening right now.'"

Within hours of the April 1 release, TikTok, YouTube, Twitter, and Twitch were flooded with Content Warning clips. My entire Discord group was messaging each other to get it for free while they could. Others were happy to buy it after it hit $8.

"Right now I'm just crossing my fingers that it would be really cool to hit a million [sales] in the first two weeks," Nyland said.

Landfall plans to support Content Warning in further updates, but is also continuing work on the studio's main project, a procedurally generated level speedrunning game called Haste: Broken Worlds and It is called.