Dwarves are great. We’ve known this since Gimli, Glóin’s son, joined the legendary ring community around Frodo and his halfling friends. Since then we also know that dwarves are little, bearded curmudgeons who like to dig in caves. But the whole concept only really escalated in 2018 when the development studio Ghost Ship Games released Deep Rock Galactic into early access.
Since then, the co-op shooter featuring space dwarves has been considered a real insider tip, especially with friends. There is no successor to this yet, but on February 14th, a spin-off called Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor was also released in Early Access, which is now even surprising the developers of its predecessor.
1:03
This is what the brand new offshoot of the long-running co-op hit Deep Rock Galactic looks like
More Steam players than the template
The reason for the astonishment is the sheer number of players in Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor. Because less than a week after its release, the game achieves what the great original took four years to achieve: the game has a simultaneous number of players on Steam of over 46,000.
In a posting on
Link to Twitter content
Wow! Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor has just overtaken Deep Rock Galactic in terms of concurrent active players. That was not planned!
Apparently there is already a very loyal fan base that has a big heart for the dwarf shooter and has therefore jumped on the spin-off bandwagon. In fact, Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor has increased its lead over the original even further since Lundgaard’s posting.
The following Sunday, the car shooter reached a new player record, which amounted to 56,943 active players at the same time. Incidentally, the spin-off was not developed by Ghost Ship Game itself. Survivor was built by an external team called Funday Games.
Why is the game so successful?
Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor combines the colorful dwarf universe with the game mechanics of a completely different surprise hit: Vampire Survivors. A basically simple but extremely successful rogue-like in that you blast away thousands of enemies in bullet hell style. However, the character fires his weapons independently; you just have to choose the positioning.
That sounds banal, but once you gain experience round after round, improve your character and then do even more damage and crush even more enemies, it’s fun for hours.
That’s exactly what Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor is about, which unlike Vampire Survivors at least doesn’t rely on pixel graphics. But shooting and equipment are also collected here automatically.
The fact that so many people start playing straight away is also due to the low price point. Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor costs a paltry nine dollars on Steam.