Scum sells 700,000 copies in a week, wipes all servers with new patch

SCUM has been in Early Access for one week and we can't thank the community enough for your support! Our team is working hard on new updates, features, and content for our now 700,000 players! More news soon, prisoners. pic.twitter.com/7af7Z3lFklSeptember 5, 2018

Survival game Scum has had an eventful first week in Early Access: leaping into the top ten games by playercount on Steam, including and then quickly removing some Nazi tattoos, and now, wiping out everyone's online characters in the latest patch. Along the way, according to Scum's twitter feed, it's sold 700,000 copies. That's... quite a week.

As far as the character wipes go, a patch was issued today to address an issue with singleplayer saved games, and fixing it required wiping all online characters:

"To enable single-player save, we needed to change save files format," the patch notes read. "This means that all characters on all servers have been wiped. Sorry for the inconvenience, we'll try to make wipes as less frequent as possible. Please don't forget that game is still under heavy development so things like this can happen."

I checked and sure enough, my online character is completely gone. Oddly enough, my singleplayer character is still fully intact. Look, here he is, taking a dump in the woods with all his gear, post-patch. What a jerk.

So, it sort of sucks that all online players have been wiped on all servers, but these things happen in Early Access from time to time. It can be frustrating to login and find all your stuff gone, especially since in Scum you not only collect gear but also build and improve skills while you play.

On the plus side, the patch notes also include the "first wave of server optimization that should decrease lag," adds admin commands for singleplayer games, and fixes a number of bugs. It also makes the sentries remember if they've seen you before. From now on you'll get one warning if you're spotted, but one warning only. If they see you again later, they'll just straight-up shoot you. Fun!

We've also been playing a bit of Scum, and recently prepared a Scum guide for beginners, as well as a guide on how to find the best guns and gear on Scum's map. Could come in handy now that we're all fresh spawns again.

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.