
“ Darkest Dungeon II … from Red Hook Studios had a better than expected debut, with 23,700 CCU (surpassing the original’s CCU peak of 19,300 users), and 3,400+ Mostly Positive reviews. As we narrated for our paid Plus subscribers on its week of release: Īnd when Darkest Dungeon II hit 1.0 on EGS and made it to Steam for the first time on May 8th, 2023, with a price adjustment to $40, it quickly broke big. The sequel - which switches up the original game’s formula in a few key ways - was a strong seller among non-AAA EGS ‘timed exclusives’, selling an impressive 300,000+ units on Epic Games Store at $30 during the 18-month Early Access period, according to a recent interview with the Red Hook team. So when the sequel released on Epic Games Store in Early Access form in October 2021, many wondered - how would the team follow it up, especially given the OG Darkest Dungeon has “multiple years of free updates & paid DLC improving it, including all the quality-of-life elements that result”, as Sigman comments. In some ways, this was surprising - Red Hook’s co-founder and game design director Tyler Sigman jokes to us: “Our logline of ‘a game about the psychological stresses of adventuring’ never felt like a surefire widespread hit to us!”

The title - which now has 5.2 million players on Steam, according to data Red Hook shares below - has been one of the biggest ‘grimdark’ Steam games of the last decade.

If you don’t know Red Hook Studios’ original ‘gothic turn-based RPG’ Darkest Dungeon, which debuted on Steam Early Access in January 2015, we’d be surprised. Darkest Dungeon II: a hit with focused ‘differences’

While we await the blessed moment when ‘hot game scopps’ rain down upon us all like confetti at a Flo Rida-guesting bar mitzvah, we have lots of game discoverability data and insight for you all - starting with a look at the data behind a hit sequel. What’s going to be the most surprising comeback of the summer*? (*That isn’t Tim Langdell’s ‘Edge ’?) Let’s all wait and see… We can feel it, folks: Hype O’Clock - aka the ‘not E3’ reveals of myriad new PC and console video games - are almost fully upon us.
