World War Z is getting a Switch release and Game of the Year Edition

World War Z will be released for Nintendo Switch, while a Game of the year Edition has also been confirmed.

A release date for Nintendo’s console has yet to be announced, but Matt Karch, CEO of developer Saber Interactive, told IGN “getting this to run on the Switch is the hardest thing that we have had to do – this is true even though we are porting our own [Swarm] engine over to the platform.”

Saber was also responsible the Switch port of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt released in 2019.

World War Z Game of the Year Edition will be released on May 5, priced at $49.99 for PS4 and Xbox One and $44.99 for PC via the Epic Games Store.

It will feature the original game and all DLC including a new three-mission PvE episode set in the French city of Marseille featuring fresh maps, story and characters.

Saber was originally inspired to work on World War Z by the success of Valve’s Left 4 Dead series, which launched in 2008 and received a sequel the following year.

“World War Z has had a huge impact on our studio in all respects,” Karch told IGN. “It feels fantastic to hit goals that perhaps a few years ago seemed unimaginable. We have over 10 million registered players that have played the game and our concurrent player counts are regularly in the tens of thousands.

“During our free week on the Epic Games Store 9.9 million people claimed the game and we peaked at 250k simultaneous users across platforms,” he added. “The Epic team told me WWZ was the most successful free game on EGS yet – we even topped Left 4 Dead 2 in terms of downloads and number of players.”

It was announced in February that Saber was to be acquired by Embracer Group, the parent company of publishing labels Deep Silver and THQ Nordic. Karch hinted at the time that the studio could choose to develop a sequel to 2019’s World War Z, which he said had sold between three and four million copies.