[We love dwarves... A week and a bit after Bay 12 reported big on Dwarf Fortress sales (open in new tab), Ghost Ship Games announced that Deep Rock Galactic had sold 2 million units (open in new tab) in 2022 alone. What is it with gamers, dwarves, and mining?

Not that we're surprised; Deep Rock Galactic is a very good game and boasts one of the few, if any, consistently cool player communities on the entire Internet. In fact, the game's mighty ore miners have recently spent some time rolling out an incredibly welcoming red carpet for fans (via GamesRadar (opens in new tab)) of holololive VTuber Cicilo Button (opens in new tab). Call me cynical, but I generally don't expect the Venn diagram of "anime catgirl fans" and "gray-haired dwarf mining game players" to overlap, but the community still greeted Botan's fans in droves and even created a healthy meme (opens in new tab) to commemorate the occasion.

The Hollow Live community noted how welcoming the DRG players were. Commenters on a Reddit post highlighting the fan-based crossover were pleased with how warm their welcome was. "AsaTJ (opens in new tab) wrote, "They are so upbeat, enthusiastic, and welcoming." And H4LF4D (opens in new tab) said, "The community itself made me want to play the game."

Shishiro Botan's recent stream is not the reason Deep Rock sold so well last year. This co-op FPS has been selling well for years. But I think it's important to have a reliable, welcoming and non-judgmental community to keep players engaged and, importantly, to get their friends talking about the game. That said, it's nice to see a measure of kindness find success in the world, even if the community is irrelevant and people flock to Deep Rock for the highly customizable mustache.

We rather enjoyed this game when we reviewed it in 2020; Phil Iwaniuk scored it 79% in his Deep Rock Galactic review (open in new tab), emphasizing its thoughtful "asymmetrical class-based cooperative play" and Yet, he noted that much of the player experience depends on "how well you observe and, most importantly, learn from good players. I have to imagine that the positive atmosphere of the community helps with that.

If you're interested, you can check out the full stats for Ghost Ship's weird and wonderful Deep Rock Galactic here (opens in new tab). Judging by the number of deaths from falls, it looks like someone should install a safety rail there.