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Bay 12 Games has made $7M from the Steam release of Dwarf Fortress

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Re: Bay 12 Games has made $7M from the Steam release of Dwarf Fortress

#14
post #9

Well, yes. Charging 30$ will generate those numbers for such an anticipated game.

It could also have completely flopped though, since the classic version is free and for die hard DF fans who know all hotkeys inside out there's little actual reason to switch to the Steam version.

But they did a really good job making the game approachable to newcomers.

Re: Bay 12 Games has made $7M from the Steam release of Dwarf Fortress

#18
post #7

The drop-off after launch is pretty wild.

If you mean in player count, that's normal. Peak is always during launch day, then there's a long tail, and very successful games might slowly rise after a couple years and surpass the launch peak. While Dwarf Fortress has had a fantastic launch, it will never be a wildly popular game to increase its player base by much more than its release, especially in the oversaturated gaming market of today.

Yeah there's always a fairly substantial drop-off. Dwarf Fortress[0] dropping by half from 14k on average down to 7k one month later is roughly the same as Elden Ring[1] (522k to 211k) but on a slightly different scale

[0] - https://steamcharts.com/app/975370

[1] - https://steamcharts.com/app/1245620

Re: Bay 12 Games has made $7M from the Steam release of Dwarf Fortress

#20
post #9

Well, yes. Charging 30$ will generate those numbers for such an anticipated game.

It could also have completely flopped though, since the classic version is free and for die hard DF fans who know all hotkeys inside out there's little actual reason to switch to the Steam version. But they did a really good job making the game approachable to newcomers.

Many of the other big classic style roguelikes on Steam, like ADoM and ToME, also have free versions available. And those games also do excellently (though nowhere near as well as DF is doing).

Games are still such a refreshing change from the MBA driven coercion in much of other business, and especially tech. Make a good product, and people will buy it. And appealing to a micro-niche is still enough to make one a multi millionaire.

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