Space dwarf mining game Deep Rock Galactic has snagged a whopping 6 million new players following its PlayStation release, thanks to the game launching straight into January’s collection of free PlayStation Plus games for PS5 and PS4. That’s a huge number of new players and sees the game now stand at a lifetime total of 10 million players after 3 million sales.
Deep Rock Galactic has taken a little while to get to this point. First launching into Steam Early Access and Xbox Game Preview in 2018, it took two long years for developer Ghost Ship Games to mine their rich vein of gaming gold and transform it into a game ready for release. When it did hit version 1.0, it launched across both PC and Xbox One in May 2020, but overlooked the PlayStation at that time, despite being teased.
Still, in the nearly 4 years since first going on sale, Deep Rock Galactic accrued 3 million game sales. A little bit of napkin math shows that there’s roughly 1 million players left unaccounted for, which we’re going to put down to Deep Rock Galactic being added to Xbox Game Pass in October 2020.
That the game could pick up 6 million extra players in just one week is truly impressive, but also shows just how different PlayStation Plus and Xbox Game Pass really are in how they reach gamers. PlayStation Plus has 47 million subscribers as of September 2021, while Xbox Game Pass is figured to have around 20 million. You might expect that this means Game Pass will reach 2/5th the players that PS Plus can, but that would be to overlook that Game Pass has a continuous stream of more than 10 games added each month, all vying for attention in a library with hundreds of games. Meanwhile, PS Plus currently offers three games per month, giving a much narrower selection for subscribers to check out.
All told, we’re happy for Ghost Ship Games on every level. 3 million sales in and of itself is great, 1 million players via Game Pass is also pretty fab, while 6 million more on PlayStation is just showing off. The one downside to all this is that Ghost Ship Games has three separate communities – PC Steam players, Xbox and Microsoft Store players, and PlayStation players – as there’s no cross-play or cross-save functionality.
Deep Rock Galactic is a great co-op game in which space dwarves head down to subterranean caverns on an alien world and fight off alien bugs while searching valuable minerals. It comes with a chunky aesthetic that really works for the sometimes claustrophobic action and is a good bit of fun when you have a crew of buddies.
We were thoroughly impressed with the game when it launched back in mid 2020, saying:
“Ooh, aah, that’s how it always starts, then later there’s running and screaming. Deep Rock Galactic can be deceptively easy going at times, right up until the swarms of bugs come crawling out of the inky darkness to besiege you and your friends. Who knew space dwarf mining could be so fun?”
Source: press release
