Torchlight Nearing 1 Million Units Sold, Console Versions Planned

From the “totally unsurprising” department comes word via Joystiq that Runic Games is in talks with both Microsoft and Sony to potentially release a console version of Torchlight during this year’s holiday season. Torchlight II will likely make the same transition, though it will at least be after the PC and Mac versions are released:

Runic Games had dreams of putting Torchlight on Xbox Live Arcade, then it put “serious effort” into a console version, and now the studio is hoping to have the game out by this holiday for PSN and XBLA. Runic CEO Max Schaefer told Joystiq at Gamescom today, “We’re trying, we’re talking [to Sony and Microsoft] and we hope to get that done quickly.” Although there’s no release window, he told us it’ll “hopefully” be available “by the holidays.”

Schaefer also told us the game has now sold over 750,000 units and is en route to a million. The RPG reached the half-million milestone back in May after launching in October, following a tiny development time of 10 months. If the sales figure seems a bit low, the executive mentioned that piracy has been an issue, but they have no way of tracking how many illegal copies were made.

As for Torchlight 2 on consoles, Schaefer told us Runic will “try” to get the multiplayer sequel to consoles sometime after the PC and Mac release.

It’s great to see the team enjoying some much-deserved success. The piracy issues are unfortunate, though.