🧑 You
Is there much info about Crate Entertainment on the internet? I'm trying to figure out how much they spent on their recent DLC, as it looks like a massive success right now. It's a private company so it's very difficult to find anything solid about company size, how many people work on Grim Dawn vs other games, what the lifetime earnings are for GD and how much each DLC made for them.
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OK, I have enough information to compile a comprehensive answer. Let me summarize what I've found.
🤖 Assistant
Here's a comprehensive summary of everything publicly available about Crate Entertainment and the Grim Dawn/Fangs of Asterkarn situation:
Crate Entertainment is a very small, independent studio based in Massachusetts founded in 2008 by former Iron Lore (Titan Quest) devs.
Crate is privately held with no outside investors (they're fully independent). Here's what piecing together tells us:
|
Milestone |
Date |
Units |
|
Base game |
May 2017 |
1 million copies |
|
Base + DLC |
April 2019 |
3 million units |
|
Base + DLC |
May 2020 |
Approaching 5 million units |
|
Base + DLC |
Feb 2022 |
7 million units |
|
Base + DLC |
June 2026 (per WCCFTech interview) |
10+ million units |
The Crate Entertainment about page says: "Grim Dawn has gone to sell over 5 million copies of the base game and over 6 million units of DLC on PC."
Since we can't get exact sales data (Steam doesn't publish DLC sales publicly), but here's the ballpark:
The WCCFTech interview reveals a lot:
"We projected our initial estimate based on past expansions, but the mood was different... We just went ahead and started working on big, bold ideas. That did blow out the scope dramatically."
"Thanks to the strong support Grim Dawn has seen over 10 years from our community, we were able to absorb the additional development time/costs."
Scope:
Cost guesstimate: For a 20-30 person studio running for ~2 years, with this much content (new art, animations, engine work, shapeshifting system, WASD controls, UI overhaul), the dev cost was probably in the $3-6M range. The fact that they say they "absorbed" the overruns suggests they had plenty of cash reserves from GD's massive ongoing sales.
Fangs of Asterkarn is almost certainly already profitable given the launch numbers. At $18.99 with the fanbase this loyal, even 300K sales would cover a ~$4M dev budget comfortably. Given they set a new all-time CCU record and the game still has 21K players right now (10 days post-launch), this looks like a massive success. The big reveal from the interview: Grim Dawn 2 is coming! They said: "With Grim Dawn wrapping up, we are excited to start laying the foundation for Grim Dawn 2!"