Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor sells half a million copies in its first week of early access as developer Funday Games reveals plans for the future

A Digger fighting off a horde of bugs in Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor. — (Image credit: Funday Games)

Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor launched into early access last week, taking the bug blasting and space mining of the original cooperative experience and reworking it into a Vampire Survivors-style autoshooter. It's proved to be a winning combination, with the game selling half a million copies in its first week.

These big sales aren't simply down to a canny brand tie-in either. DRG: Survivor already sits with a "Very Positive" rating on Steam out of over 9,000 reviews. Robin was likewise taken with the game when he assessed it last week. "As a big fan of Vampire Survivors-inspired games, I think this is my favourite yet," he wrote, pointing to the way each class alters how the game feels as one of its primary draws.

These include the Digger, who "loves to be churning through stone while their guns fire back out the tunnel behind them to keep the bugs at bay," while the Engineer "is always dashing between different defensive positions, turtling up whenever they can".

It's a strong foundation to build upon, and developer Funday Games plans to do exactly that. The studio released its roadmap for Survivor earlier today, detailing its immediate and longer-term ideas to update the game.

Regarding the former, Funday hopes to add new biomes, new mutators for each biome, and a separate upgrade tree for Bosco, the floating drone who lights up areas and helps you mine while exploring, to make him "an integral part of the game." Looking further ahead, the studio wants to add new missions, "awesome" bosses, random events like earthquakes, and much more.

Deep Rock Galactic is going from strength to strength right now. The main game is still carving out new features into its bedrock, having recently added a prop hunt minigame that involves drinking transmutative beer. There's also another spinoff currently in development, Deep Rock Galactic: Rogue Core, a "roguelite twist" on the vanilla game's cooperative shooting with a greater emphasis on character building.

You can check out the full roadmap of what's coming next to Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor here.

Rick has been fascinated by PC gaming since he was seven years old, when he used to sneak into his dad's home office for covert sessions of Doom. He grew up on a diet of similarly unsuitable games, with favourites including Quake, Thief, Half-Life and Deus Ex. Between 2013 and 2022, Rick was games editor of Custom PC magazine and associated website bit-tech.net. But he's always kept one foot in freelance games journalism, writing for publications like Edge, Eurogamer, the Guardian and, naturally, PC Gamer. While he'll play anything that can be controlled with a keyboard and mouse, he has a particular passion for first-person shooters and immersive sims.