Subnautica 2 sells 2 million copies in 12 hours, hits 651K concurrent players

Subnautica 2 hit Early Access yesterday and moved 2 million copies in its first 12 hours, according to developer Unknown Worlds. Peak concurrent players reached 651,000 across PC and Xbox, with 18,000 positive Steam reviews so far.

The game runs on Unreal Engine 5, a shift from the first game's Unity base. That means different optimization concerns — UE5's Lumen and Nanite can tank framerates on older cards if you're not careful with settings. Early reports suggest the game runs well on mid-tier hardware, but RTX 3060 and RX 6700 XT owners should expect to tweak shadow and reflection quality to hold 60fps at 1440p.

This is an Early Access launch, so expect patches. Unknown Worlds says the full 1.0 release is at least a year out. If you're jumping in now, you're signing up for performance swings and missing features.

If you pick it up, run a BetterFPS optimization playbook to find stable settings before you dive in. Early Access builds change fast, but baseline tweaks — shadow distance, volumetric fog, motion blur — still apply.