Dwarf Fortress creators made over $7M in one month from Steam launch

Brothers Tarn & Zach Adams were the original creators and champions of the colony simulation game. Dwarf FortressFollowing the December 2022 release of Steam’s version of the game,, revealed they had made $7.2 Million in January 2023.

It has been 20 years since the Adams brothers worked on it, most of the time without any help. The game was first made available to the public in 2006, after being developed by the Adams brothers. The Steam release is the final step. Dwarf FortressTheir work was free and available to all.

In his post on the official forums of Bay 12 Games — the name of the brothers’ development studio — Tarn Adams noted that the the company was bringing in between $14,000 and $16,000 per month prior to the Steam release. So it’s quite a big jump in revenue!

It’s also a life-changing amount of money for the Adams brothers, after decades of toil on the game. “A little less than half will go to taxes, and we’re continuing to pay people and new business expenses and such, so it’s not all personal money, but a lot of it is,” Tarn said. “Enough that we’ve solved the main issues of health/retirement that are troubling for independent people, as well as safeguarded the future of the game well enough.” The brothers said they now “felt comfortable” putting another coder to work full-time on the game.

In a previous post in early January, Tarn said that the game sold almost half a million copies in December, and it’s likely the revenue from these sales — minus Steam’s cut, and the cut taken by Bay 12’s publisher Kitfox Games — that has just landed in Bay 12’s bank account.

Despite the game’s famous impenetrability — somewhat alleviated by the actual graphics of the Steam version (previously, the game used text-based ASCII art) — the Steam version of Dwarf Fortress It has been very well received. Steam reviews are overwhelmingly positive, and fans are quick to say how happy they are to pay for a game they’d been playing for free previously.

What does it mean? Dwarf Fortress, exactly? It’s not an easy question to answer — but we tried.