A 462x month-on-month increase in revenue
Dwarf Fortresssellinghalf a million copies on Steamin just a few weeks already indicated that its creators, the Adams brothers, were due a windfall. Now the latest earnings report from Bay 12 Games is here to put an exact dollar figure on that success. Here’s a tease: revenue in January was up over 462x since December.
The success of Dwarf Fortress’s polished-up Steam release has already led to Bay 12bringing a new programmer onto the project for the first time. More broadly, it means that the ongoing development of Dwarf Fortress - which is meant to be decades-long still - is ensured, with Tarn and Zach Adams able to cover, as Tarn puts it, “the main issues of health/retirement that are troubling for independent people.”
Dwarf Fortress has been a remarkable, beautiful thing for a long time, but its success on Steam never felt inevitable. The past ten years have seen many other games pilfer ideas from it and make those ideas more graspable,as Sin wrote about recently, but I’m thrilled that the OG has finally found a large paying audience. Thebird hole is more packed than ever.
