Grounded's 5 million players milestone caused Xbox marketing lead to get a tattoo on his forearm

Obsidian's Early Access experiment with Grounded is working.

Obsidian's co-op survival game Grounded has attracted more than 5 million players since it was released in July of this year.

The news comes from a post on Xbox Wire, celebrating the release of the game's Koi Pond update.

To celebrate this milestone, Xbox Game Studios' marketing manager Marcus Morgan got the character BURG.L from the game tattooed onto his forearm.

This was the result of a bet that the marketing team had with Obsidian about how well Grounded would perform. Initially, he was going to get some ink if the game attracted 1 million players, before upping that to 5 million when Grounded broke the 1 million record within a few days of its release.

On Steam, Grounded quickly became a best-seller, hitting a peak concurrent user figure of 16,851 following its release, according to Steam Charts. Not bad considering the game is also available as part of Xbox Game Pass.

Microsoft bought Obsidian alongside fellow RPG specialist InXile back in November 2018. The platform holder teased the studio's next tile, Avowed, earlier this year.

Grounded is also playable on Microsoft's brand new Xbox Series X and Series S consoles.