We’re overdue for an update and have lots of exciting news, so let’s get to it!
First up, Dioramas!
Darkest Diorama
Box Shot
Check out some of the images of the fantastic prototype diorama and packaging! Panda Mfg did a great job and after some final tweaks we will be approving them for manufacturing. After that it takes a couple of months to do mass production and ship them back to us for distribution. So while there is still some time before these arrive at your homes, we can’t be more excited to see progress!
Missed the Kickstarter campaign and want to purchase a diorama? We will be selling some of these limited edition dioramas online after we ship to our backers.
Art Book and Prints
We have manufactured the prints and now just need to have Chris sign them and we can begin distributing. That will be done soon.
Art book creation is progressing and we will finish it up after we ship The Crimson Court DLC. (See below.)
Steam Workshop Support!
Last month we released our official integration of Steam Workshop! We’ve always wanted to support mods for Darkest Dungeon, and going back to the Kickstarter we listed it as a stretch goal. Though at the time we didn’t reach that level of funding, due to our success through Early Access, we decided to fully incorporate Workshop after release. Last month marked the beginning of that support, and we cannot be more excited to see what our players come up with!
A few weeks back, we started the slow trickle of information about the upcoming DLC. The small blog post earlier last month that gave a high level look at the expansion’s scope, but if in case you missed it, here’s the link.
We did an article for Game Informer and that coverage should be live later today for subscribers and will be printed in their magazine next week. In that article we give the first glimpses of some new enemies and The Courtyard dungeon region - so keep your eyes out for that.
That’s all for now! We will post another update once we get some more details on the Art Book and prints, as well as a release date and price for the Crimson Court. For now, happy hunting and keep your torch bright!
With the end of the year fast approaching, and the Holidays already in swing, we wanted to give an update to what’s going on with the Darkest Dungeon Backer Rewards!
Backer Exclusive Art Print
Backer Exclusive Print Preview
We’ve partnered with Fangamer for this print and we have sent off the assets for production. We are excited to work with Fangamer as they have produced many amazing prints and we know that you all will be happy with the production quality. Once they are printed they will ship them to Chris to get hand signed, and he’ll ship them back and Fangamer will then help us mail them to you!
We will be posting updates on production of these as we hit each step, it will be important for you all to update your shipping info on your Backerkit profile. We will send out a notice to let you know when we will be locking in shipping info - so do us a favor and update it now if needed!
Our goal is to get these out as soon as they are produced, which could mean before the end of the year! Merry Christmas!
Art Book
Original sketch work for the Hamlet
Chris has sent all the assets to the graphic designer who is now working hard on getting our art book put together. We know how excited people are for this particular reward so we wanted to make sure we captured as much of the game’s artwork as possible. It’s also something we want to be really special so this is going to take a little extra time. The book measures 10x10 inches and will be approximately 60 pages of never before seen sketches, rough work, commentary and (of course) final in-game and promotional artwork!
We expect this to be completed and shipped in Q1 of next year as with the Holidays already upon us, it won’t see printing until after the New Year.
As a special thank-you, we’ve decided that *all* our backers are going to receive a digital “Art of the Crimson Court DLC” pdf mini art book after the DLC ships next year!
Dioramas
Mock-up of the Dioramas
Now that we’ve decided on the numbers and assets, the final content will be assembled with the help of a graphic designer and then sent to Panda Game Manufacturing for printing. We are also excited to work with Panda! They are well known and make beautiful products. We plan on making the dioramas out of high quality chipboard, so they will feel like good sturdy components that you see in many boardgames.
Manufacturing these will take a couple months, but we figure that high quality is the most important objective.
What if I missed out on buying some of these rewards?
We will be printing extras of the Art Books and Dioramas for you to buy, although the original backers will be getting the best deals on them and also some special content.
The backer-exclusive signed art prints, however, are exclusive to those who pledged for them back during the campaign.
That being said, we plan to print other, non-exclusive art prints for people to purchase!
That’s all for now
2016 has been an incredible year for our game, and our community. With these last rewards on the horizon, as well as Mod Support and our first DLC expansion “The Crimson Court”, 2017 is shaping up to be just as exciting!
We are enjoying the process of getting the physical merch together and we have been thinking about other potential products that could help celebrate Darkest Dungeon.
We cannot thank you enough for making all of this possible. You can look forward to more updates as we move these items through the production cycle.
With the recent launch on PlayStation 4 and PS Vita, Darkest Dungeon has now sold more than one million copies.
We remember reading this article from Yacht Club Games, makers of the amazing Shovel Knight and appreciated their transparency about hitting 1MM copies. So this is a gesture to continue what they, and other developers, started.
There are a lot of things we can say about hitting the one million copies threshold, but none of them truly encapsulate the event. We are humbled, grateful, excited, freaked out, dizzy…
More than anything, though: WE THANK YOU!
Sales Breakdown
Darkest Dungeon is on sale on a variety of storefronts: Steam, PlayStation Network, GOG, Humble Store, Apple OSX App Store, CDP.pl, SoftClub, Nuuvem.
We were going to post a pie chart with sales breakdown by storefront, but the reality is that Steam accounts for 94% of our copies sold up to this point. Steam is obviously an enormously popular storefront, but there are a few other reasons for this lopsided number as well:
Early Access was done only on Steam, and launched February 3, 2015. Sales were extremely strong right off the bat--we did over 50,000 copies in 24 hours, which definitely resulted in a lot of stunned faces around our office.
Full release for PC and Mac occurred on January 19, 2016 and brought the game also to GOG.
PlayStation 4 and PS Vita versions only launched on September 27, 2016. Sales have been decent so far (approximately 50k copies worldwide), but the recent launch accounts for the reason why the platform only represents a tiny amount of our cumulative sales to date.
Crowdfunding was done via Kickstarter and Humble Widget and accounted for the first ~11k copies sold
Image Courtesy of the Legendary Dan Panosian
We do have some charts to share! First is our sales chart (top) and our concurrent users (bottom) on Steam since our Early Access launch.
As you can see our EA launch was incredible! But something that we are proud is that our peak concurrent users happend on our full release on Jan 19th. While our full release wasn’t as high of a peak as our EA release, you can see a really solid sale period (Steam Holiday Sale) leading up to the release in January.
While the majority of our sales come from the United States, there are many regions in which our game has done well in. This is in part why we pushed hard to localize the game in 7 languages at launch, and plan to add more in the future.
Random Factoid: Per SteamSpy, the average owner has played 27 hours of Darkest Dungeon.
The Bit about History
In 2013, we broke ground on DD because we were intensely passionate about the idea, and hoped that a robust but niche RPG audience might find it interesting to embark on a merciless and dark exploration into what it truly means to be a hero. It would be an RPG about the sword arm, not the sword. Only in our wildest dreams would the game find an audience of the size that it has.
Our goal was always to make the game without diluting our original creative vision, and then let it succeed or fail based upon its own merits. We are beyond happy that people have found it captivating.
From the first announcement and release of the “TERROR AND MADNESS” trailer through the recent PlayStation launch, we have been excited to see the game resonate.
The Bit about Adventures Ahead
Thanks to your support, and the game’s success, there are some exciting things ahead. As you might have seen, we recently announced the first DLC, “The Crimson Court”, coming in early 2017.
Steam Workshop support has long been on our to-do list, but we needed to finish the core game before doing it. Official modding support is coming! We can’t wait to see what the community comes up with.
Other platforms that might be a fit for DD are high on our list. Tablet immediately comes to mind; as it turns out, we accidentally designed a pretty cool touch interface from the beginning! Other console and handheld devices remain interesting as well, and we’d like to get the game to as many potential fans as possible.
Official Merch, starting with our final Kickstarter rewards (Art Prints, Art Books, Dioramas) is high on our mind. We have some things in the pipe already, but we invite interested partner companies to propose co-productions at the business inquiries line in the signature block of this post.
Last, but not least, we can confirm that Red Hook will most certainly be making another game.
“Game 2” hasn’t begun production yet, and this in no way means that we are done supporting or adding to Darkest Dungeon. But as long as you keep supporting what we do, we want to keep making things for you! It is not hyperbole to say that we are doing our dream jobs, and we love what we do. We also specifically love Darkest Dungeon, despite the fact that we, too, sometimes lose our favorite heroes and want to destroy our keyboards. We get Afflicted from time to time during development, though we aren’t quite ready to share with you what each of our predominant Afflictions are!
Image courtesy of the legendary Joe Madureira
The Bit about the Thanking
We want to extend a special thank you to our Kickstarter and Humble Widget backers. Without you, this game simply could not have been made the way it was. Although we have now delivered on the vast majority of rewards, we still have our prints, dioramas, and art books to make--and we are ridiculously excited to start manufacturing of those soon! Stay tuned for details. We are working on them.
We would also like to thank so many wonderful people and organizations that were involved in helping us get to this point. Here are a few, but the list is by no means complete: dear friends at IndieMegaBooth, Valve, Sony, Humble, GOG, Apple… we began listing all the other independent developers that we owe thanks to, but the list was getting super long and we still are afraid of forgetting people that have been incredibly important and helpful. So let’s make the thank you general and widespread: if you know us and have helped us, you know what we are thankful for.
Darkest Dungeon has already been a ride beyond our wildest expectations. We hope you continue with us into all the uncharted realms ahead. Until then, cinch your harness, ready the antivenom, and continue the good fight...or douse the torches and search dark corners for gold. The choice is yours...
Sincerely,
Red Hook Studios
FMI:
www.darkestdungeon.com
Game feedback: feedback@redhookgames.com
Press inquiries, including media key requests: press@redhookgames.com
Business and Licensing Inquiries: biz@redhookgames.com (key requests will be ignored here)
It’s time for an update! Today we announced our release date for PS4 and PS VITA: September 27th, 2016. We’ve been hard at work getting the ports together and we are super excited to have it coming out next month!
We will be doing pre-orders on the Playstation Network soon, and if you are a PS+ member you will get 20% off the launch price ($24.99 USD). Cross-buy and Cross-save will be for all purchasers and not just PS+ members.
Backer Rewards
With all the work going on for the Playstation ports, we had to delay some of the physical rewards. But now that we are able to start seeing around the bend, we wanted to give everyone an update!
The remaining physical rewards are the Backer Print, Diorama, and Art Book. So let’s review:
Backer Print - These are ready to print and shipped to Chris and Tyler to be signed, just waiting for some time post PS release.
Diorama - These have been started but we are still finalizing the specs.
Art book - This is an anticipated item and we want to do it justice. Chris will be devoting time to this after the PS release and we expect delivery to be Q4 this year.
There is only one remaining digital reward, and that is the Estate Map. Chris wants to livestream the creation of the map. The livestream will be later this month (August) and we will announce a hard date soon. We’d love have you all tune in and keep Chris company as he works his magic!
OTHER GOODIES
That covers all the things promised in the Kickstarter, but we also have other cool things brewing.
Steam Workshop - This is the next major feature we plan to work on post PS release.
DOTA 2 Announcer pack - Yes! This is still planned, we done a first pass on the lines and are now punching them up.
Future DLC - We have some awesome ideas brewing and hope to share more news soon.
It is because of your support that we have means to continue working on Darkest Dungeon. We are eternally grateful that we are able to support our game this way and hope to continue to add cool and exciting content to the game.
FAQs
Can I get a PS key if I backed?
Sorry, but no. During the crafting of our KS campaign the wording we used only promised the PC version of the game for redemption. Playstation was not an option for key redemption to our backers.
