Dwarf Fortress (opens in new tab) hit Steam yesterday, however you most likely know that already. In truth, there is a respectable likelihood you personal it. Kitfox Video games, who printed DF’s “premium” Steam model, enlisted the help of an economist (opens in new tab) earlier than yesterday’s launch to attempt to predict what number of copies the sport would find yourself promoting after its ASCII model spent 16 years as a free obtain on Bay 12’s web site (opens in new tab). The prediction was respectable: About 160,000 copies offered in two months.
Dwarf Fortress hit that in beneath 24 hours (opens in new tab).
In equity to Kitfox’s poor economist, they did describe the expertise of predicting DF’s gross sales numbers as “like making an attempt to drive with the rearview mirror,” and their two-month estimates ranged from beneath 100,000 offered to over 1,000,000 copies offered. That is much less an indictment of their predictive powers than it’s proof of how tough it’s to precisely forecast gross sales and the behaviour of Steam’s algorithms.
It is all of the more durable as a result of, whereas Kitfox’s again catalogue has its share of bangers, it is by no means printed something with the huge historical past and fanatical fanbase of Dwarf Fortress. It was all the time going to be an outlier.
In truth, as I write this, the preferred thread on the sport’s Steam dialogue discussion board is one began by a perplexed person asking if followers have “been taking part in free DF for 25 years [sic] and simply ready for a chance to pay $30?”. It is at the moment accrued 100 pages of individuals saying “Sure” (opens in new tab). I am no economist, however I feel the upper finish of these earlier estimates may find yourself being rather a lot nearer to the mark about two months from now.
We somewhat appreciated gaming’s premier dwarf-traumatiser at PCG, scoring the prettied-up Steam model 84% in our Dwarf Fortress evaluate (opens in new tab) and calling it “an expertise you will not match wherever else”. It is nonetheless a hyper-complex failure simulator “it’s a must to meet greater than midway,” however let’s be sincere, what different free sport ever had legions of followers queuing as much as drop $30 on it 16 years after launch?
