Hello Riftbreakers!

Today marks the fifth anniversary of The Riftbreaker’s version 1.0. Almost four years of development resulted in our most ambitious title to date and, by far, the single biggest success our studio has achieved. Back then, we wouldn’t even dream of having our game reach over three million players (including all platforms and subscriptions), yet somehow you made that happen. If it weren’t for you, we wouldn’t be writing this article today. Please see it as a single, large thank-you from the entire EXOR Studios and all the people involved in the making of The Riftbreaker to you, our community. Let’s take a look at what we managed to achieve in the past five years - fun stats incoming!

2021 - Just the beginning

The launch announcement mentioned that version 1.0 was just the beginning for The Riftbreaker. We genuinely meant that, as we had lots of ideas and plans on how to expand the game. However, game launches are tricky - you never know how many people will discover your game and decide it is worth a try. By the end of the first week, everything was clear. More than two hundred thousand people decided to step through the portal to Galatea 37, which shattered our expectations. We truly had a community and an audience that we wanted to spoil with great updates in the years to come. It was also the time when we were confident enough that adding co-op would be a good idea, so we announced that we would start working on it right away and that it would take at least six to twelve months of development. Technically, we were correct!

2022 - Full speed ahead

In 2022, we kept running at full speed. We released forty-six updates on Steam (counting the experimental ones) and 136 builds in total, which amounts to a new patch for some version of the game every 2.68 days (that includes platforms other than Steam). That year, we also released The Riftbreaker World Editor Suite - the full set of tools that we used to create the game ourselves. The next logical step was to implement Steam Workshop, mod.io support, as well as an in-game mod browser. All these portals started quickly filling up with various mods for the game. Since we started as a modding group, that made us shed a tear of joy. Halfway through the year we also released our first World Expansion update, along with the Metal Terror DLC, linking the universes of The Riftbreaker and X-Morph: Defense. That release also taught us a valuable lesson - do not be afraid to postpone a release if it’s going to positively impact its quality. We’ve been following that ever since.

2023 - Into the Crystal Caverns

World Expansion II came in May 2023. It opened the Crystal Caverns for exploration and invited you to discover a new part of the Story Campaign - the Into the Dark DLC. Digging into solid rock to make room for your base was a nice change of pace, and also a technical challenge. We had to figure out how to enable creatures to attack your base from all directions in spite of tons of limestone in the way. However, by this point you know we’re up for the challenge! We followed that up with the free Summer Update with one hundred and fifty-six new decorative items to spruce up your bases. Simultaneously, we continued our work on the co-op mode when something unexpected emerged. We accidentally created a working PvP mode, which we started playing to test the connectivity of our game. By the end of the year, over three hundred testers from around the world joined us, allowing the team to precisely diagnose the issues our game faced in real-world conditions. That kept us busy for the rest of the year. You were busy, too - there were 481 Riftbreaker mods published in 2023 alone! Worth mentioning - that’s also when we held our official modding competition, with Frognik and WirawanMYT taking home brand-new, Riftbreaker-themed, custom gaming PCs.

2024 - The Fungal Swamp

In 2024, we took you to the Fungal Swamp for the third World Expansion update and the Heart of the Swamp DLC. The scattered islands surrounded by mud and water required changing your entire base-building strategy - especially given the fact that the creatures had no trouble wading through the lakes to reach you. We designed over 70 new tech items to help you with that, so it’s kinda even! The Closed Co-Op Beta Test also started that year, enabling people from outside our office to play The Riftbreaker online for the first time. The beta had a lot of issues, but we enjoyed the continuous improvements enabled by our ever-growing tester army. Your feedback gave us a lot to think about, especially Wzysb’s 40-page analysis of all the weapons in the game. Although we did not agree on all of his points, we implemented many improvements in the 2.0 update.

2025 - The 2.0 Update

In 2025, we started preparing for the launch of that update. At the start of the year, we opened the beta test to everyone who requested a key, sending out over twenty-five thousand keys in total, before moving into the Open Beta model in June. It ran surprisingly smooth, which was no doubt a result of thousands of hours of cumulative testing from the community. The 2.0 Update finally landed on August 25th, as a free upgrade for all our PC players. Apart from the long-awaited Co-Op mode, it included an entirely new endgame with Megastructures, Omega creatures, and a new loot system. We had hoped to see around four thousand concurrent players after the update. Once again, you smashed through our estimates. The peak player count during the Co-Op release period was more than eighteen thousand. You breathed a second life into the game, almost four years after its launch.

2026 - The Open Campaign

This year, World Expansion IV introduced the Open Campaign mode and a brand-new Cryo Fields biome. The Open Campaign allows you to skip the entire story and play the game exactly the way you want. The only objective is to build the Prime Rift Station. We’re not stopping there, either. Development of World Expansion V is already underway, this time focusing on Survival Mode.

Now let’s take a look at real, hard data.

• On the day the game launched, the game’s repository was at revision 25821. That’s how many times we added, changed, or deleted something in the game files. Today, that number stands at 62264. It means that we added 150% more content to the game after the release compared to what we launched with! The busiest year was 2024, with 8273 changes.
• Since launch, we’ve released 75 updates for the main version of the game on Steam: 11 in 2021, 25 in 2022, 15 in 2023, 8 in 2024, 12 in 2025, and 4 so far this year. Counting experimental and test versions, we’ve pushed over 250 builds to Steam altogether.
• The Schmetterling Engine lives in its own repository. It received more than 12000 changes since the game’s official release in October 2021.
• Every patch has to pass an automated save test gauntlet. It involves loading save states from various points in the campaign, overwriting the save file and reloading it once more. That test ran more than 1100 times, amounting to 4000+ hours of continuous loading screens. That’s about five months.
• Since the game’s launch we have published 335 Steam announcements - from short hotfix notes to lengthy ‘Co-Op when?’ articles, with a couple getting dangerously close to Steam’s post character limit.
• On launch weekend, 79518 of you played on a single day, with 21741 playing at the same time. The 2.0 Update brought 70590 of you back in a single day, and World Expansion IV another 60537.
• In the year after the 2.0 Update, an average of 13524 of you played every day - almost four times as many as the year before.
• The number of you playing on Linux, Steam Deck included, keeps growing - from around 25 playing at the same time at launch to over 200 when World Expansion IV came out.
• Steam has measured the playtime of over 1.5 million of you. On average, you’ve spent 26 hours and 42 minutes on Galatea 37 - over 41 million hours altogether, or more than 4700 years!
• 81% of you played for more than an hour, which Steam considers above average. Almost half a million of you stayed for more than 20 hours, and around 77000 of you crossed the 100-hour mark.
• 65000 of you played our Co-Op playtest, and almost 100000 downloaded it.
• You have published 1125 mods on Steam Workshop and 505 mods on mod.io.
• Over 25000 of you made the effort to leave a review on Steam. Over 90% of those reviews were positive. Thank you for that!

All these numbers are incredible for our small studio. It’s a badge of honor, but also a sign of your trust in us, and we do not take that lightly. World Expansion V is coming your way, and we are already working on new and exciting things, one of which is even set in the world of The Riftbreaker! Join our newsletter at https://www.exorstudios.com/blog/#newsletter and our Discord at https://www.discord.gg/exorstudios not to miss any of that.

None of this would have been possible without your help. We would like to thank all those who played the Prologue, and tried out the Alpha and Beta versions before launch. We want to thank all sixty-five thousand Co-Op playtesters, and everyone who played the official-unofficial PvP connectivity test. We want to thank each and every modder, pushing the game to its limits every day - WirawanMYT, frognik, Killtech, ponomaryow.dmitry - you guys are the GOATs. We want to thank Wzysb for his 40-page essay on why the Shotgun is bad. We want to thank everyone who watched our streams and voted for stronger attacks, and everyone who stayed with us during all the ‘co-op when?’ years. We are grateful for your patience and your support.

Thank you for five amazing years. Here’s to ten more!
EXOR Studios