Half a million copies in seven days for a remake of a 25-year-old niche European RPG is a result that deserves some respect.
THQ Nordic announced on June 12 that Gothic 1 Remake has shipped 500,000 units across PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S since its June 5 launch. The game peaked at 78,000 concurrent players on Steam on June 7 and currently holds an 85% “Very Positive” rating from more than 4,553 English user reviews. For context, the original Gothic series built a devoted following across Europe, particularly in Germany, but never became a major mainstream seller. These are strong first-week numbers, and they reflect a community that had been waiting for this release for years.
The milestone announcement landed on the same day as Patch 1.0.1, the game’s first substantial post-launch update. The most talked-about change is a new lockpicking difficulty indicator, added in direct response to community feedback that the minigame was poorly readable at launch. Crash fixes are included as well, with DLSS and FSR integration identified as a source of instability in specific scenarios. Economy adjustments reduce item fees and increase quest gold rewards across multiple quests. Quest and navigation issues covering dozens of specific cases have been corrected, and creature balance has been adjusted. Players should remove installed mods before applying the patch, as Alkimia has flagged compatibility conflicts with the new build.
Critical reception has been broadly positive with caveats. OpenCritic aggregates show reviewers consistently praising the world design, authentic Gothic atmosphere, and the quality of Alkimia’s UE5 reconstruction of the Colony. The recurring complaints are technical: bugs at launch, slow early pacing, and dated combat that the remake preserved with perhaps too much fidelity to the original. The performance demands of the UE5 build on PC have also drawn criticism.
The more consequential patch is still coming. A second major title update scheduled for late August targets the areas the community has been asking about most directly: pawn AI improvements, a full UI rework, and a genuine PC performance overhaul targeting a dynamic crowd LOD system to address the CPU-intensive NPC simulation that has caused frame-time spikes in cities. DLSS 3 and FSR 3 upscaling support, absent at launch, and an FOV slider will also arrive with that update. Dark Arisen, the expansion, launches October 9.
If the August patch delivers on performance, Gothic 1 Remake could end up being remembered as a strong RPG that launched rough and got better. The half-million in week one gives Alkimia and THQ Nordic the financial runway to follow through.