On February 17th, ROCKFISH Games celebrated an amazing 10 years as a company. What a decade it’s been!
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In this time, our small team has released two breakout titles, spectacular expansion content, and a sizable number of community-focused updates bringing fixes, tweaks, and features to the EVERSPACE series. We’ve grown to a studio of just over thirty, with team members scattered around the world. We’ve created an amazing global community filled with enthusiastic space game fans who thrive on our transparent communication. And we’ve formed strong bonds with the biggest platforms and hardware makers—partnerships that form the foundations of our future.
What makes ROCKFISH Games is our team. We could not have done this without the handful of creative developers who followed Christian and I from our previous venture, most of whom are still with us today, and the team members who have joined us over the years since we opened our studio’s doors. We’ve made it our goal to find and keep great people who want to make exciting space games, sometimes turning down risky opportunities to ensure our team is protected from the turbulence that buffets the gaming industry in cycles—we’ve dodged quite a few bullets here.
The ROCKFISH Games of today was forged from a love for space games, and a series of tough situations turned golden. When ROCKFISH began, we used the lessons learned in our prior experience creating the Galaxy on Fire series. Like many indie studios, we turned to crowdfunding and working with the community as a way to bring our vision to light, and that was the best thing we could have done at the time.
Our independence became a core strength of the studio. We’ve spent time building internal expertise and finding the right partners to work with. With these strengths to lean on, we can place our trust in the team to build amazing things without overbearing oversight, giving them the freedom to create and opportunities to grow by engaging the latest technology as it becomes available.
EVERSPACE hit at just the right time. Rogue-likes were on the upswing in popularity, and our space shooter twist clicked with fans from our GoF days and new players across the globe. Our DLC follow-up, EVERSPACE: Encounters, added much more to the game, including some fan-favorite characters—to this day, we’re still asked by the community to make Elek plushies. Perhaps someday we’ll do so.
It is from these beginnings in community development that we built the foundations of our communications style with weekly live streams during development and frequent, in-detail blog posts on Steam and Kickstarter, plus a sizable demo kept up to date with the latest state of development. We favor transparency, though we cannot share everything, and through this have created a reputation for quality among space game fans. We hear what’s asked of us and frequently deliver changes and community-requested features while holding true to our vision.
Our journey through Early Access with EVERSPACE 2 these last few years has been an exciting one. Pivoting from our rogue-like roots to an open-world action RPG looter shooter was a risk we were willing to take, as this game is so much closer to what we’d originally envisioned for our EVERSPACE series. I’m glad to see that players around the world were so on board with this shift, and it certainly resonated with the media as well. Strong early reviews and consistent coverage kept us in the limelight as the game became bigger and better—our 1.0 launch went even better than our first game, and we’re still receiving strong support from fans of the genre.
Apart from the commercial success that enables us to continue doing what we love, the biggest reward for everyone at ROCKFISH is to see so much positive feedback about our hard work from fans of the genre. We still have so many fresh ideas, so many amazing stories left to tell, and fantastic adventures lined up for space fans around the globe.
To Christian, thank you for being my partner in this adventure. To the team, I’m looking forward to another 10 years with you all. We’re going to continue creating incredible things together.
Michael 🚀🫡
How many turrets are too many? “Twenty-three” says the dev team.
