by Søren Lundgaard - Captain of the Ghost Ship
Oh, I know - we have been quite silent for a while, but now we are back with some pretty big news! - or at least, it's pretty big to us! :D
Some of you might remember us writing on Facebook about our trip to Dreamhack in the middle of Sweden. What we didn't write at that point, was that we also connected with Coffee Stain Studios, a band of awesome and amazingly nice Swedish game developers. So nice, in fact, that after some negotiations, they have decided to both invest in our company and publish our game, Deep Rock Galactic!
Perhaps you don't know Coffee Stain by name, but it's quite likely that you've heard of a little game called Goat Simulator, which they created and published to the world. It sold like crazy and has reached more than 20 million people. Even more relevant, they have also created and published the Sanctum FPS co-op games on Steam and consoles, reaching millions of players. We could see a lot of synergies between our companies, and after a quick visit at their place in Skövde during January, it became clear that we were destined to do great things together.
Now, business deals tend to take a long time to negotiate - it is not unusual for complicated deals like this take 3-6 months from start to finish. However, as with everything around Ghost Ship Games, we somehow managed to make this happen real fast. We'd like to send a huge thank-you to Capnova being with us from the start and for making all of this possible. (Some of you might remember that Capnova was our initial investor, and without them we would not have been in this nice situation)
It's been some pretty crazy weeks and it doesn't stop here - over the next few weeks, we are going to tour the US, showcasing Deep Rock Galactic to the world!
Our first stop is GDC in San Francisco next week. Here, we have a very nice showroom at something called The Garage SF, where we will play the game with journalists, platform-owners and other games industry contacts. We share this place with 3 other indie-developers under the umbrella of Coffee Stain Publishing and Raw Fury, another Swedish indie-publisher.
We will showcase the latest iteration of the game, which has been tested extensively by our great Closed Alpha community and has improved quite a bit since we last showed something back in December. Btw, psst, you can still sign up to the Closed Alpha on our home-page - do it now before the entire world starts flooding in! :D
Next stop: PAX East, Boston, where Coffee Stain and Raw Fury has a large booth in the public area. We have designed an awesome booth for Deep Rock Galactic - a bit in the vein of the old Gauntlet arcade machine. PAX East is a consumer event and a REALLY big one. Here, we will showcase the game to future fans as well as whoever else shows up at our booth.
After we get home from the US and relax for a couple of days, the plan is to continue promoting the game with Coffee Stain and prepare the launch of the Steam Early Access version later this year. The exact date is still yet-to-be-defined.
Read the press release on our collaboration with Coffee Stain here:
http://www.coffeestainstudios.com/…/coffee-stain-invests-i…/