Welcome to the world of DayZ, hit by a new and presently unknown infection which has wiped out most of the world's population. You are one of the few that have survived and now you must search this new wasteland in order to fight for your life against what is left of the indigenous population now infected with the disease. Go solo, team up with friends or take on the world, as you choose your path in this brutal and chilling landscape using whatever means you stumble upon to survive.

DayZ is a gritty, authentic, open-world survival horror hybrid-MMO game, in which players follow a single goal: to survive in the harsh post-apocalyptic landscape as long as they can. Players can experience powerful events and emotions arising from the ever-evolving emergent gameplay. There are no superficial tips, waypoints, built in tutorials or help given to players. Every decision matters, there are no save games, no extra lives, every mistake can be lethal. If you fail, you lose everything and you need to play again from the beginning with nothing but your wits, and your two hands. Fight the hostile environment, where every other player can be friend or foe and nothing can be taken for granted.

Just over a year ago, Bohemia Interactive released DayZ on Steam Early Access. Yesterday DayZ achieved 3,000,000 sales. This is the standalone version of the extremely popular Arma 2 modification created by Dean Hall, that has started and defined an entire genre of video gaming and inspired many other games studios.

From the beginning of the DayZ Early Access program, the DayZ team has continued to update the game on a regular basis. Since the initial release the team has released 24 updates to the main public branch of the game.

These updates have been focused on improving DayZ, and have included core redesigns of some of the most significant features including the inventory, multiplayer architecture and map improvements. As the DayZ team outlined in their development plan for 2015, there are many more large improvements in the pipeline, such as the transition to an improved anti-cheat system and multiplayer optimizations.

One of the largest changes that the DayZ team began in 2014 was to rewrite the core engine. Improving the engine will have significant long term benefits to DayZ and all of DayZ's 3,000,000 players. The name of the new engine is Enfusion. The main benefits to reinventing the core engine are in the upgrades to the renderer, as this will enhance performance for players, and also vastly improve the visual aesthetics of particle effects. In the long run these improvements to the engine will enable DayZ to utilize DirectX 11, which will further enhance the experience of console versions of DayZ. Enfusion will also bring upgraded tools for both the DayZ team and content creators, improving the efficiency of creating official content and modifications. Currently DayZ is still mostly using the Real Virtuality engine, however throughout 2015 DayZ will progressively switch to utilizing Enfusion to a greater extent.

All of these improvements have been possible due to the expansion of the DayZ team to over 80 people. This expansion allows the project to take on these greater challenges and increase the tempo of development in 2015, bringing more quality updates to DayZ's 3,000,000 players.

"We would like to say thank you to every single one of the three million players, that have joined us on the journey of making DayZ. You all have helped make DayZ the best open world, zombie survival game. This is an amazing achievement, and we are really looking forward to start sharing with you all of our game design improvements, anti-hack solutions and other optimizations we have been working on for a majority of the last year," said DayZ project lead David Durcak.