The holiday season comes with both winter-themed and festive events in many video games, particularly those with ongoing development pipelines. For example, Pokemon GO's Holiday 2021 event adds Bergmite. Deep Rock Galactic's XMAS 2021 event kicked off Tuesday, offering players a "Bonus Assignment" to earn new cosmetics and other useful items. More players than ever will potentially be jumping on, as last month Deep Rock Galactic reached three million units sold.
While not a new co-op game in 2021, Deep Rock Galactic certainly seems to have hit a stride. Official modding support was implemented in September, then developer Ghost Ship Games announced a board game adaptation in October before completely overhauling its update system to start a seasonal battle pass. Not only does Deep Rock's season structure help formalize the studio's process, game director Mikkel Martin Pedersen said it also helped break concurrent user records. The Best War Games spoke to Pedersen about the history of Ghost Ship Games and how its humble beginnings make this recent milestone that much sweeter.
Building Ghost Ship Games, a Studio With Principles
Video games were one of Pedersen's "big addictions" while studying film at the University of Copenhagen in the late 1990s. After failing to get into The Danish Film School, where he had hoped to become an editor, he decided to try working in the games industry. Pedersen said there were only a few companies operating out of Denmark at the time, but he managed to land an internship at Deadline Games in 1999. He was there a year before getting hired full-time, working on titles like Globetrotter 2 as game director and Total Overdose as lead level designer.
The studio shut down following the financial crisis of 2007, so Pedersen moved on to numerous gigs before landing at the Microsoft-owned Press Play. There he worked on games like Max: The Curse of Brotherhood until Microsoft closed the studio in 2016. After that "some of us working there together said now is the time, we should start our own company," and so Ghost Ship Games was co-founded by six people. Among them was CEO Soren Lundgaard, whom Pedersen met when Lundgaard was lead programmer on Total Overdose.
"When we started out we had an idea for Deep Rock Galactic, but we also wanted to build a company. We were very much aware that we wanted to make a studio with people we love to work with, a specific culture that has principles."
Pedersen said all the founders of Ghost Ship had experience as leads or middle managers but never called the shots, which made it "really fun" to take that experience into a new company. One of the main principles that went into Ghost Ship is a hatred of "crunch," or some form of compulsory extra work imposed to meet deadlines.
Deep Rock's game director said Ghost Ship Games was also set in motion with the understanding that some start-up money was needed. "I'm 48 and the rest of the guys aren't young anymore," he said, with many having to support spouses, kids, and house payments. They received government funding before partnering with Coffee Stain, despite originally not being sure if they wanted a publisher. "They understood game development, and it made us very confident in working with them."
Deep Rock Galactic's Open Development
Another principle upon which Ghost Ship Games operates is having transparent "open development." Deep Rock Galactic was conceived by lead programmer Jonas Moller, whom Pedersen said was exploring caves in Minecraft and felt, "If only we had big guns, this could be really awesome." Proceedurally generated caves were combined with a love of co-op games like Left 4 Dead, and Deep Rock's "easy to understand" concept was set.
The team decided not to go for a "splash," instead opting to build progressive milestones and celebrate along the way. It started with a desire to get just 10 people signed up for Ghost Ship's newsletter, and the team was as open as possible to accomplish this. It made the "super scary" choice to share screenshots and videos from a prototype build as early as six months after the studio was founded, as Pedersen said the philosophy was knowing its next upload would always look better.
He recommends this approach for any company that's able to accomplish it, as "I'm really tired of this secrecy from other game studios or publishers." Even if Ghost Ship still uses embargoes, he feels overall transparency is better than silently working on a game for five years. Despite not having that "splash" reveal, Deep Rock Galactic's growth was propelled by big events following its closed Alpha period.
Deep Rock Galactic aired a trailer at E3 2017, then the game had a huge bump after its Steam Early Access and Xbox Game Preview launch in February 2018. Its Early Access didn't skyrocket the game "insanely high" like titles such as Valheim, but Pedersen said it was solid enough to know they had a success. At that time there were only 12 employees, and everyone was contracted "because we didn't know if we'd have money the next month."
A few bigger bumps came from events like free trial weekends, but Pedersen said the next big peak was its official 1.0 launch in May 2020. Season 1: Rival Incursions dropped on November 4, 2021, which led to peak concurrent user counts as high as 41,000. As of now there are about 28 employees at Ghost Ship, with "no more than 20 people" on pure development.
If nothing else, watching Deep Rock Galactic grow over the course of its open development has been "satisfying," as tracking the success has motivated Ghost Ship's six founders and the rest of the team. It's likely the co-op title will only continue its steady climb to the top, as the team will be working on a lot more content like additional secondary weapons in upcoming seasons, and Deep Rock Galactic is also launching for PS4 and PS5 in January 2022.
"Working on Deep Rock Galactic and creating Ghost Ship Games has been pure fun. We're making the game we'd like to play ourselves. It sounds crazy, but that's how it is, we didn't think too much about the end user when we started. We're gamers and hoped if we made something we loved, others would love it too."
Deep Rock Galactic is available now on PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S. It will launch on PS4 and PS5 in January 2022.