Alongside the Among Us and Fall Guys stories of 2020, a particularly unsung powerhouse of the year was Coffee Stain Publishing and developer Ghost Ship Games’ sci-fi dwarven mining shooter, Deep Rock Galactic. The game came out of early access in 2020 and absolutely slayed with its class-based co-op gameplay. With the successful 1.0 launch in 2020, Coffee Stain recently revealed that the game crossed over 2 million copies sold coming into 2021.
This tidbit was revealed in a celebratory infographic shared in a press release by Coffee Stain Publishing on January 26, 2021. Where 2018 saw a little over 500,000 copies sold and 2019 saw just over 400k, 2020 and the 1.0 release saw Deep Rock Galactic sell over 1.18 million copies alone, nearly tripling the sales of the previous year. Other interesting stats include a peak concurrent count of around 20,000, a growing playerbase which has spent an alleged 7,478 combined years playing the game, and a maintained user review ranking of #42 (at this time of writing) on Steam250, which tracks the most highly-rated games of the platform.
Coffee Stain Publishing and Ghost Ship Games have plenty to be proud of when it comes to Deep Rock Galactic. The game’s blend of Left 4 Dead, Helldivers, and other action co-op shooter experiences into its chaotic and addicting overall experience earned it plenty of praise from across the industry, including an award for Shacknews Best Co-Op game of 2020. While it might not have had the sung praises of other darling hits in 2020, the game was undeniably good and arguably deserves all the sales and more.
Largely, Coffee Stain Publishing and Ghost Ship attribute their success to listening to fans and expanding Deep Rock Galactic with the feedback given to continue to make the game one of the best co-op experiences around. With that in mind, we can probably expect to see the game continue to grow and expand in meaningful ways throughout 2021. Until then, big congrats to the publisher and devs. It's well-earned.