Wait, how has It Takes Two sold 20 million copies?

In October, Swedish developer Hazelight Studios announced that its co-op game It Takes Two had sold 20 million copies. It Takes Two is not a minor release — it was backed by publisher Electronic Arts’ EA Originals label, and won Game of the Year at the 2021 Game Awards. But the sales tally still came as a shock to many reading about it.

It Takes Two is a co-op platformer in which a married couple who are planning on getting a divorce are magically trapped in a pair of dolls by their daughter’s tears, and must work together to overcome a series of obstacles. It’s a small-ish game that reviewed well on release but fairly swiftly disappeared from mainstream games media. Yet here it is posting sales figures that would be the envy of pretty much any AAA blockbuster; 20 million is just shy of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom’s sales tally, for example, and would probably put It Takes Two somewhere just outside the list of the 50 bestselling games of all time.

It is also interesting that It Takes Two reached this sales milestone more than three and a half years after its release. Indeed, a little digging into Hazelight’s public announcements of the game’s sales tells an even more remarkable story. 

In its first seven months, It Takes Two sold 3 million copies. It took another four months to reach 5 million. Five months later, it hit 7 million. Ten million in February 2023. Sixteen million in March 2024. There’s a clear pattern here: It Takes Two has sold at an unwavering, consistent rate of around half a million copies per month since it came out. 

It hasn’t slowed down. In fact, it has sped up slightly. Its average sales rate in the seven months after its launch was around 430,000 copies per month. In the seven months up to October 2024, it was selling roughly 570,000 copies on average every month.

This is an incredibly unusual sales pattern, usually reserved for the most perennial of hits, like Minecraft. What went right?

“First of all the game turned out really well, we are extremely proud of it and the overall reception of its quality has been remarkable,” Hazelight’s chief operating officer Oskar Wolontis told Polygon over email. He went on to make the usual qualitative claims about the game’s “vibrant and hugely varied adventure,” “engaging story,” “unique concept,” and so on. But he did reveal a few interesting tidbits.

Firstly, It Takes Two is achieving these sales figures without any marketing support to speak of. The initial marketing budget was “low,” Wolontis said, and “there’s been no meaningful marketing spend for It Takes Two for quite some time now.” He also noted that reported sales figures do not include downloads from subscription services like Game Pass and EA Play.

Secondly, the Game Awards win definitely helped, and not just in the U.S. — it had a global effect. “It did have an impact, we saw a substantial uptick in sales in all markets,” Wolonits said. He also noted that the GOTY win prompted many streamers and influencers to pick It Takes Two up, which further increased its reach.

Thirdly: “It has found a big audience in both the Western markets and Asia,” Wolonits said. He was likely talking around It Takes Two’s reported runaway success in China, where it is not officially licensed for sale (but, like many games from outside China, that isn’t a major impediment to success). Director Josef Fares claimed on a December 2021 podcast that “almost half” of the game’s audience was in China, and it won Game of the Year at the Bilibili Game Awards based there. In a 2022 article, GamesIndustry.biz theorized that the game’s accessible co-op gameplay, uncontroversial style, and divorce theme might have helped it succeed in a country where multigenerational households are common and divorce rates are soaring.

Finally: It’s the co-op, stupid. Wolontis noted that Hazelight’s brand of enforced co-op adventures — split-screen games designed for two players, no more and definitely no less — satisfies a broad appetite, but remains almost unique, guaranteeing a level of word-of-mouth success. “There is a huge number of players in the world who enjoy co-op gaming, and there are a large number of games with co-op gameplay out there. But the kind of co-op play that It Takes Two offers (and A Way Out as well), is very rare or even non-existent outside of those games,” he said. “We saw from early on that It Takes Two has a very impressive growth through word-of-mouth (which has also rubbed off somewhat on A Way Out), and we attribute its quality and uniqueness to that.”

There you have it: If you want to sell 20 million copies of your game, identify something that large numbers of players want but that nobody else is doing, preferably with a multiplayer component for added virality. Also, make sure it’s globally palatable and can penetrate any market. That’s far from easy. But it is, surprisingly, quite simple.