Dwarf Fortress Finally Makes Its Developers Some Cash

Dwarf Fortress is an absolute classic among certain types of gamers. It’s a strange and tough game that was released back in 2006 and has been in constant development ever since, but back in December 2022, a newer, easier-to-play version was released. That version has now gone on to sell a significant number of copies and has finally made the designers the money that they deserve.

 

The original Dwarf Fortress game has a heavy text-focused UI and ASCII graphics. It is not particularly pleasant to look at, but a version with more readable graphics was released by Kitfox Games and the company published a Medium post to explain what has happened in the two months since the easier-to-play version’s release.

The Itch.io and Steam version of Dwarf Fortress, according to the post, was projected to sell around 160,000 copies in its first two months, but it instead sold that in a day. At the time of publication of the post, the game had sold 606,342 copies. This meant that the original developers over at Bay 12 Games, which is made up of two people, finally received a proper paycheck for a game they’ve been developing since 2002. They used to get about $15k a month, but this time they got 7 million.

The rest of the Medium post goes into some of the specifics about what all was done at the company and why they think the game managed to do so well. They mostly lay the success at the feet of Dwarf Fortress already having a name for itself and the increased visibility on places like Steam. Both of these helped to push the game to be a success.

Overall, it’s great to see these two guys, who have been working on this game for far too long, getting what they deserve for their many years of tireless work to make Dwarf Fortress into the overly complex thing it is and will forever continue to be.
 

Justin van Huyssteen (@LC_Lupus)
Senior Editor, NoobFeed