'DayZ' News: Arrives to Xbox Game Preview Later This Year

By Kevin Reyes, Christian Post Contributor Tuesday, February 06, 2018

The development team behind Bohemia Interactive's open-world survival game "DayZ" has announced that the game will finally arrive to consoles through the Xbox Game Preview system later this year.

When someone asked the official "DayZ" Twitter account if there was any news regarding the game arriving to consoles, the development team enthusiastically shared that this would finally be the year that their title goes outside of the PC landscape.

"Yes!" they wrote in their Tweet. "Coming to Xbox Game Preview at some point this year, we're not sure about PS4 yet, but we'll release there too, eventually - just don't know when yet."

This is not the first time they have talked about releasing a console port of the game. Even back in November 2017, they announced that 2018 would be the year they finally release to console and leave Early Access on Steam.

What is Xbox Game Preview? Well it is basically Microsoft's version of Early Access for their home consoles, where players can purchase and play games that are still in the middle of development, perhaps to support the developer or just out of sheer curiosity. It should be noted that "DayZ" has been in real Early Access ever since it first became available way back in 2013.

But is it too late for the game to really flourish? On Steam, it currently holds a rating of Mostly Negative reviews due to poor performance and, well, being stuck in Early Access for nearly half a decade.

There is also the fact that "PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds" (PUBG) and "Fortnite" exist, two games that could have potentially stolen "DayZ's" intended audience. Just a few weeks ago, PUBG reached 4 million players on the Xbox One, and the PC version of the game continues to maintain an average of a million players per month, much larger than "DayZ's" average of a couple thousand.

This could very well be a case of "DayZ" just having taken too long to get up and running and, even if it comes to consoles this year, it just might be dead on arrival.