After much anticipation, Frostpunk 2 launched last week to near-universal praise. The strategic city-builder's success is underlined by the fact that the game has seemingly even exceeded its developer's expectations, with game sales for PC and macOS alone already surpassing the game's development and marketing cost just three days after launch.

In a post to the official Frostpunk 2 account on X, the developer celebrated that the game had officially sold over 350,000 copies. At $44.99 in the US, the new game costs $15 more than the original, which launched in 2018 and has generated an estimated total revenue of $53 million—since its launch. In contrast, Frostpunk 2 has supposedly already earned an estimated revenue of $3.5 million, according to Game-Stats.com, although estimates from Gamalytic put that closer to $10 million.In the days since its launch, Frostpunk 2 easily surpassed its predecessor's all-time peak player count of 29,361, with Frostpunk 2 attracting 35,533 concurrent players on Saturday, 21 September—less than 24 hours after the game's initial release. Curiously, despite generally positive critic reviews, Frostpunk 2 actually has a lower player review score on Steam than the original Frostpunk. Where the original sits at 91% positive reviews, Frostpunk 2 has only reached 71% positive reviews on Steam so far.

Frostpunk 2's success somewhat mirrors that of Sony's recent Astro Bot, which skyrocketed to the top spot on PS5 in no time. Both Astro Bot and Frostpunk 2 were made by relatively small teams on lower budgets and in shorter time frames than are usually allotted to AAA titles. This seemingly allowed the teams behind each to take more risks and have greater creative freedom over the end product.