The Kiwi creator of DayZ would like to see the zombie mod go stand-alone and free-to-play.

Dean Hall, who works for ArmA developer Bohemia Interactive as a multiplayer designer, made the comments at an indie game show in the UK.

The game's numbers certainly justify such moves - over 420,000 people are playing the open world survival horror FPS mod of the 2009 game ARMA II, and over 10,000 new players are joining every day.

The alpha version of the game launched a mere three months ago.

"Currently we're running 22,000 concurrent at full peak, and 10,000 off peak, which is pretty huge numbers considering the original data structure and system was designed to handle 100 concurrents, and two servers," said Hall during his developer session.

"We now have 1000 servers. We're getting 110,000 players in a 24 hour period at the moment."

Such rapid growth has forced Hall to migrate of the game's servers six times. Five servers have burned out, and every update causes a server crash.

"We have trouble telling the difference between a DDoS (denial of service attack) and whether some YouTube channel has posted a video of the game," said Hall. "It makes things pretty interesting."

Meanwhile, Hall has confirmed that dogs are coming to DayZ - in all likelihood, they'll be German Shepherds, he said.

-Gameplanet

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