In February 2016, it was announced by Daybreak that the game had been split into two separate projects with their own dedicated development teams, with the game being rebranded as King of the Kill while the other became Just Survive. Despite the unstable launch, John Smedley, CEO of Daybreak Game Company, announced that the game had sold over a million copies by March 2015. A new bug, which made all servers go offline, was also introduced to the game after the developer released a patch to fix other problems. At release, the game suffered from numerous technical issues, such as players reporting that they could not login to their account or enter any active server.

Z1 Battle Royale was originally released on Steam's early access program on Januas H1Z1.