Zach (left) and Tarn Adams have become multi-millionaires thanks to Dwarf Fortress.
The Tarn brothers and Zach Adams have been working on their building game Dwarf Fortress for over 20 years before the title was finally released on Steam in December 2022 – and in our test it turned out to be a true masterpiece:
Dwarf Fortress im Test
A building game masterpiece that will outlive us all
The patience has paid off twice with the Steam release: Dwarf Fortress has not only become a great game, but also turns out to be a real gold mine for Bay 12 Games.
7 million dollars after just one month on Steam
Dwarf Fortress has been in development since the early 2000s and was first released in 2006. Until the release on Steam, the developers, who always offered their game completely free of charge, were only financed by donations from their followers.
in one new forum post the Adams brothers have now revealed further details. Prior to the Steam release, donations brought in a more than tidy sum of $14,000 to $16,000 per month. With the Steam release, however, this amount has now multiplied.
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Dwarf Fortress: The GameStar fortress blossoms and prospers (gameplay impressions for the test)
According to Tarn Adams, over $7.2 million was generated in one month. Almost half of this goes to the tax office in the form of taxes and various business expenses have to be paid, but a large part actually goes into your own pocket:
(…) So it’s not all private wealth, but a large part of it is. Enough that we’ve solved the top health/retirement issues troubling the self-employed and have secured the game’s future well enough. (…)
Shortly after the release on Steam, the siblings announced that they were bringing a third programmer, Putnam, on board who had already made a name for himself in the DF community – money for a decent salary should definitely be available by now.
Instead of bathing in money now, the development of Dwarf Fortress will of course continue as planned – among other things, more graphics will soon find their way into the game, such as baby animals instead of just downscaled versions of the adult versions. The adventure mode from the ASCII version of the game should also appear for the Steam version at some point.
