IO Interactive’s long-awaited James Bond game, 007 First Light, has launched to remarkable commercial success, moving 1.5 million copies across all platforms within its first day on sale. The spy thriller, which casts players as a young and reckless James Bond finding his footing as a secret agent, is now the fastest-selling title in the Danish studio’s history — outpacing every entry in the acclaimed Hitman series that put the developer on the map. Notably, the figure was achieved without the Nintendo Switch 2 version, which is not expected until later this summer, according to IGN.
The game has resonated with critics as well as consumers, sitting at an 87 on Metacritic and 88 on OpenCritic — making it the highest-rated release IO Interactive has ever produced. Reviews have praised the studio’s dedication to capturing the Bond fantasy through a blend of stealth, deduction, hand-to-hand combat, and high-speed driving sequences. As Eurogamer noted, the game reached a peak of nearly 68,500 concurrent players on Steam, while market analyst Rhys Elliott of Alinea Analytics estimated that roughly 500,000 of the total copies sold came from Valve’s platform alone, generating an estimated $25 million in Steam revenue.
The performance is particularly significant for Amazon, which holds the Bond rights and licensed IO Interactive to develop the game. Elliott described the early indicators as extremely promising for the franchise, which has not had a well-received video game adaptation in over a decade. About a third of the game’s Steam audience overlaps with players of IO’s Hitman titles, suggesting the studio successfully leveraged its existing fanbase while attracting new players drawn to the 007 brand.
The launch has not been entirely seamless, however. IO Interactive released a day-one hotfix addressing several crash bugs, including issues triggered during specific cutscenes and a problem where guards in one chapter would skip dialogue and immediately open fire on the player. A known issues list also flags a startup failure related to integrated graphics cards, intermittent HDR problems, and autosave errors that some players have encountered. Rock Paper Shotgun reported that community members have already devised workarounds for several of these technical hiccups, and the developer has indicated it will maintain a dedicated team to support the game with ongoing fixes and new content.
Looking beyond 007 First Light, IO Interactive has previously expressed its ambition to turn the Bond series into a trilogy, and the strong launch makes that prospect far more likely. But the studio’s next major release probably won’t be another Bond or Hitman title. According to Eurogamer, IO’s second-largest development team is deep in production on Project Fantasy, an online fantasy RPG first announced in 2023. Led by IO co-founder and chief creative officer Christian Elverdam, the project reportedly has a team larger than the one that worked on Hitman, though smaller than the 007 First Light crew. The game was described at its announcement as a world designed to expand and entertain players for years, though details on whether it will be a full MMO or a smaller-scale shared experience remain unclear.
For now, IO Interactive appears to be in the strongest position in its history. With a critically acclaimed blockbuster launch, a promising post-release roadmap for 007 First Light, and an ambitious new IP taking shape behind the scenes, the studio has demonstrated it can thrive well beyond the boundaries of the Hitman franchise that defined it for two decades.