More than five million new players have come to 2016’s Hitman title since the start of 2017.

That’s according to the CEO of developer IO Interactive Hakan Abrak, who, speaking to GamesIndustry.biz, said that the game has grown from two million players at the start of the year to seven now.

Furthermore, more Hitman is on the way, with Abrak saying that IO has learnt a lot from doing the first season.

"Look, we feel like we're onto a good thing with our latest Hitman game," he said.

"We've changed how we work, and as a studio we've never felt more confident and more in control of knowing what we're doing. I think our Game of the Year Edition is a testament to that. We learned so much during the first season of this game, and by the end we felt like a well-oiled machine."

Abrak does admit that the first season wasn’t perfect, however, but ultimately is happy with what the team produced.

"We're the first to admit we got some things right and some things wrong," he said.

"Changing our business model before launch caused confusion, and we had some tech issues at launch. While the episodic nature of the main story campaign received major praise from the press and many gamers, it wasn't necessarily everyone's cup of tea. What did really work wonders for the game was the live model.

"Frequent release of content, challenges and live events really exceeded all expectations. With every content update we saw more and more players joining. All of that content took a herculean effort from the dev team, and it paid off... We learned a lot that will make the experience even better for the next game in the Hitman universe."

Abrak also went into some detail about what was gained and lost during the “divorce” from Square Enix; IO no longer has the rights to Kane and Lynch or Mini Ninjas, but it does have Freedom Fighters.

IO released its episodic Hitman title in early 2016; the game launched to positive reception from critics, but was slow from a sales standpoint. Publisher Hitman announced in May that it was selling IO, with the studio ultimately performing a management buyout in June. This includes the retention of the Hitman IP.

In August, 5m people were playing Hitman 2016.