Far Far West Sells 250K in 48 Hours, Trips DDoS Shields

"It means the absolute world to us to see all of you enjoying your time in the Far Far West," developer Evil Raptor wrote in a Steam post celebrating the milestone. "Thank you all for joining us on this convoy, and we can't wait to show you what the West has in store for the future." That's the kind of statement studios put out when things go well. What they probably didn't plan for was the launch going so well that it tripped their network provider's anti-DDoS protections.

Far Far West, the debut FPS from French studio Evil Raptor and published by EG7-owned Fireshine Games, entered Steam early access this week and immediately tore through the platform's top seller list. 250,000 copies sold in 48 hours. Over 34,000 concurrent players at its all-time peak. An Overwhelmingly Positive rating from over 9,000 reviews. For a first-time FPS studio launching into early access, those are numbers that most developers would kill for, and the kind of that usually only follows months of aggressive marketing from a major publisher.

The game itself is a co-op extraction shooter about robot cowboys fighting through undead hordes with firearms and elemental magic. Players pick a mission, ride a flying train to the location, complete an objective while fending off waves of skeletons and monsters, fight a boss, then extract. Steam reviewers have been comparing it to a blend of Deep Rock Galactic and Helldivers, and having looked at the structure, I can see why. But what's getting the most praise is something I wish more multiplayer games would figure out: it respects your time. Missions can be rushed in under ten minutes or explored for thirty, and progress comes fast enough that a single session feels worthwhile rather than like a down payment on fun you'll have next week.

34K Peak and Counting

The server issues are the kind of problem every developer secretly hopes to have. When your launch is so explosive that your infrastructure's own security systems mistake the player surge for an attack, you've clearly struck a nerve. Evil Raptor has already pushed out a hotfix addressing save file backup issues, buffing XP for the bow weapon and specific spells, increasing the HP pool of the Cryptic Saloon boss, and squashing a list of bugs. Quick, specific patch notes that tell you exactly what changed and why. I love to see it.

The studio also shared a coupon code, 250KCOWBOYS, to mark the sales milestone. Meanwhile, the community has already zeroed in on what it considers the game's most critical missing feature: a dedicated yeehaw button. Deep Rock Galactic players will understand immediately. That game's "Rock and Stone" salute became a cultural touchstone for its community, and Far Far West players on Reddit and Discord are loudly insisting their robot gunslingers deserve the same treatment. A moderator on the official Discord has started collecting suggestions for potential in-game chants.

I'm excited about this one. The co-op shooter space has been dominated by live-service grinders that treat your free time like a resource to be extracted, and a game that lets you jump in for ten minutes, make real progress, and jump out feels almost radical by comparison. Far Far West is priced as an early access title, it launched in a playable state, the devs are already patching transparently, and a quarter-million people showed up in two days. Evil Raptor earned this one.