Co-op dwarf shooter Deep Rock Galactic is free to play until Sunday

Update: After a some confusion about when the free-play period ends (the announcement said Monday, the Steam page said Saturday), Ghost Ship has clarified that the free weekend ends at 1 pm PT on March 3—Sunday—while the sale price is good until March 4.

Original story: 

Deep Rock Galactic is a space dwarf mining sim co-op shooter, and if you have no idea what that means, all I can say is, welcome to the club. (It's a bit like Left 4 Dead). Fortunately for the curious among you, this weekend is the perfect time to figure it out: It's the one-year anniversary of the game's Early Access release, and so developer Ghost Ship games is making it free to play for the weekend

The studio also warned that the Deep Rock Galactic price will be going up in late March, from $25 to $30/£25/€28, reflecting its expanded plans for the game. The price change will have no impact on current owners or anyone who picks it up prior to the hike. 

"For the game itself, we are looking ahead once again," Ghost Ship co-founder Søren Lundgaard said. "We’ve got a lot of decisions to make and a lot of design to nail, but the headline of our deliberations is probably this: For several updates we’ve focused on stuff like upgrades for Bosco, weapon mods, backend improvements, overhauls of how we do Difficulty, and so forth—critical additions that make the game a better game—but we really wanna get back to making the caves themselves cooler now." 

The part of the process will begin in March with an update that will add new enemy types and elite variants, and more gear mods. An updated development roadmap indicates that further into the year the developers are looking at things like daily adventures, new mutators, an exploration mode, new soundtrack music, and more.

Deep Rock Galactic is free to play until March 4. It's also on sale until then for $19/£14/€17. 

Andy Chalk

Andy has been gaming on PCs from the very beginning, starting as a youngster with text adventures and primitive action games on a cassette-based TRS80. From there he graduated to the glory days of Sierra Online adventures and Microprose sims, ran a local BBS, learned how to build PCs, and developed a longstanding love of RPGs, immersive sims, and shooters. He began writing videogame news in 2007 for The Escapist and somehow managed to avoid getting fired until 2014, when he joined the storied ranks of PC Gamer. He covers all aspects of the industry, from new game announcements and patch notes to legal disputes, Twitch beefs, esports, and Henry Cavill. Lots of Henry Cavill.