The turned-based dungeon crawling role playing game called Darkest Dungeon has been a massive crowdfunding success. Back in April of 2014, developer Red Hook Studios went to Kickstarter after their request for a grant from the Canada Media Fund was rejected. So to help fund their idea for a dungeon dwelling RPG, the team behind Darkest Dungeon went to Kickstarter to help fund an extended period of development, which would require a goal of $75,000. With their initial trailer for the game and with the media interests the team was able to create prior to launching their Kickstarter, their funding goal was reaching in a mere two days. However, they left up the campaign until the end of the year and were able to fund raise over $313,000 from over 10,000 backers.
Once they launched their game through Early Access and fixed some bugs, their sales gradually began to pick up. And now, after about a twenty months after its Early Access release, sales have surpassed a whopping million units sold, according to PCgamer. Red Hook Studios, small indie gaming studio, was understandably extremely excited this accomplishment – expressing their gratitude in a recent blog post on the game’s website. Early Access for the game was so successful that developers decided to launch the game on the PlayStation 4 and PS Vita this past September, which no doubt further pushed their sales figures.
Nearly all of their sales came from Steam, with a 94 percent of all their sales coming from the platform. This is understandable and expected due to the popularity of Steam amongst the gaming population in general.
However, Steam isn’t the only platform Darkest Dungeon is available to buy; PSN, GOG, Humble, the OSX App Store, CDP.pl, SoftClub, and Nuuvem are all platforms in which gamers can pick up a copy of the game. In the first twenty-four hours of its Early Access release back in February 3, 2015, the game sold more than 50,000 copies. Other platforms, like GOG, didn’t provide the game until January of this year, while PlayStation didn’t sell it until a month and half ago. However, in the short amount of time it’s been available on the PlayStation Network, its sold over 50,000 copies. But the studio expect larger sale figures to come from PlayStation in the months to come.
The blog post touches upon other aspect too like player counts, regional popularity, and some of the game’s history. The first DLC, titled The Crimson Court, is scheduled for release in early 2017, and Red Hook Studios has stated that official mod support is on the way as well.
Darkest Dungeon is a gothic roguelike RPG about the psychological stresses of adventuring. For those of you who haven’t heard of the game, here’s a trailer for it: