Dwarf Fortress builders share earnings report after releasing on Steam

Dwarf Fortress promoting half 1,000,000 copies on Steam in just some weeks already indicated that its creators, the Adams brothers, have been due a windfall. Now the most recent earnings report from Bay 12 Games is right here to place an actual greenback determine on that success. Here’s a tease: income in January was up over 462x since December.

In December of 2022, the final month when Dwarf Fortress’s earnings have been pushed purely through donations, Bay 12 Games made a good $15,635. That’s roughly equal to what they made within the three months prior, too.

In January of 2023, when Valve paid out the income from gross sales of the Dwarf Fortress launch on Steam, Bay 12 Games made $7,230,123.58. That’s presumably the quantity obtained after Valve have taken their 30% lower, and publishers and co-developers Kitfox have taken theirs. Of that $7 million, “rather less than half will go to taxes, and we’re persevering with to pay folks and new enterprise bills and such,” writes developer Tarn Adams in the report. That means “it is not all private cash, however plenty of it’s.

The success of Dwarf Fortress’s polished-up Steam launch has already led to Bay 12 bringing a brand new programmer onto the challenge for the primary time. More broadly, it signifies that the continued growth of Dwarf Fortress – which is supposed to be decades-long nonetheless – is ensured, with Tarn and Zach Adams capable of cowl, as Tarn places it, “the primary problems with well being/retirement which are troubling for unbiased folks.”

Dwarf Fortress has been a exceptional, lovely factor for a very long time, however its success on Steam by no means felt inevitable. The previous ten years have seen many different games pilfer concepts from it and make these concepts extra graspable, as Sin wrote about not too long ago, however I’m thrilled that the OG has lastly discovered a big paying viewers. The hen gap is extra packed than ever.