Dave the Diver is proving to be surprisingly sticky, with developer MINTROCKET announcing the plucky, aquatic platformer has shifted another two million units in 2024, for a total of five million to date. The undeniably endearing Dave had already ratcheted up three million sales prior to coming to PS5 and PS4 in May of this year, and that, after beginning life as a Steam Early Access game, launched in 2022.
You would be forgiven for thinking that Dave the Diver is one of those exceptional indie games that rose above all the rest, like Balatro and Stardew Valley, from its homey aesthetic and truly hilarious characters and writing. In fact, it was the first game this scribe ever heard a proper indie dev, who was kind of annoyed at the situation, refer to Dave as "III" (or "iii"), as MINTROCKET is wholly owned by publisher Nexon.
This all came to a head at last year's The Game Awards when Dave was nominated for Best Indie Game, and the famously flexible Geoff Keighley gave us this banger: "Independent can mean different things to different people, and it's sort of a broad term, right?"
Are you amongst the many millions of Dave the Diver fans? Plumb the depth of the comments section below.
[source x.com, via gematsu.com]
Comments 7
All thanks to their Nikke Collab, surely!
Love this game! One of the best games I’ve played this year.
Indie or not, the game is a fantastic title, and I wish them all the success in the world. The game is addictive, but relaxing. Familiar, but unique. Gameplay oriented, but with a better story than you’d expect. It’s one of the best games of the current generation.
Everybody’s drowned, Dave.
I enjoyed this what I played of it, but took a couple of breaks from and struggled to get back into. Also thought it introduced too many gameplay elements, and gave up when they introduced eggs and chickens. 😂
Good lord these indie creators becoming millionaires is awesome 👌
How do the PS+ download numbers play into the stat of 5 million sold? Supposedly there are about 6.1 million PS+ Essential users, so for every PS+ download of the game, is it considered “1” copy sold?
Three million pc owners, maybe 50K Switch players (the game just released there in October), perhaps 500K people who bought the game through PS store, and then that’d mean that about 1.45M people who downloaded the game through PS+? Sounds about right.
It’s a fun game, it’s true. I played it for a couple hours, and I’ll come back to it again at some point. I’m still grinding away at Two Point Campus, specifically to get a teacher skilled at level 10. I’m getting really close—got ‘em to level 9 last night! Then I gotta get more students to drop out to get that trophy…and then I can be done! Just a couple more hours should do it. 😅
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