*Graveyard Keeper* was given away for free and still made $250,000 — what a ruthless move!

What first caught my eye was not that Graveyard Keeper was popular again, but that it played the old “free base game” card with a level of finesse that felt like a chain of mechanisms in an indie game. Many publishers run free promotions to chase buzz; this time, Graveyard Keeper seemed more like it was inviting players in first, then keeping them around with the sheer depth of its content. The result was straightforward as well: tinyBuild CEO Alex Nichiporchik revealed that this limited-time free Steam promotion ultimately brought the team about $250,000 in revenue, roughly 1.8 million RMB, and all of it came from DLC sales.

What makes this especially interesting is that it was not just a simple “discount promotion,” but a very smart warm-up for Graveyard Keeper 2. The free giveaway was originally launched to celebrate the official reveal of the sequel. After the event began, this first game, which had already been out for years, saw a clear resurgence in popularity, with its peak concurrent player count on Steam surging to nearly three times its previous record. Speaking of which, you can see that the logic here is a lot like the low-barrier, high-stickiness spread of Vampire Survivors, except Graveyard Keeper is not selling that addictive action loop, but rather the kind of simulation-management hooks that pull you deeper the more you dig.

If you’ve played Graveyard Keeper, you can probably understand why it works especially well with this model. It is not the kind of small pixel-art game where you can see everything in ten hours, but a management game whose layers of content gradually unfold, drawing players in through its graveyard, resources, production chains, and quest lines. For games like this, making the base game free is like the ultimate form of a demo: as long as the first few hours give players a taste, the later DLC becomes much easier to convert. That also explains the eye-catching line: “This substantial revenue came entirely from the Steam platform, and solely from sales of the game’s DLC.”

More importantly, the free promotion brought not only immediate revenue, but also wishlist growth for the sequel. Thanks to this wave of traffic, Graveyard Keeper 2 has already surpassed 400,000 wishlist additions on Steam. The development team has now shifted all of its focus to Graveyard Keeper 2, and the sequel is expected to launch on PC and next-generation consoles in 2026. For indie games, wishlists are often more of a lifeline than short-term sales, because they determine whether a game can break out with its first wave of momentum at launch.

From a player’s perspective, I actually quite like this approach. You put the old game out there first, let new players try it at a low cost, and then make money through expansion content that genuinely has weight to it. That feels far more honest than the many cases where developers serve up a half-finished product from the start. Unfortunately, though, this tactic is not suitable for every indie game; if the base game is thin and the DLC is just a few scattered patches, it can easily turn into a one-off traffic bubble, like some game jam spin-offs that have good ideas but not enough polish.

If you’ve never tried Graveyard Keeper before, this is actually a great time to catch up on its full content ecosystem. If you like the management feel of Stardew Valley but want a theme with a bit more dark humor, it’s a very distinctive choice; it’s not as gentle as the former, and feels more like Stardew Valley crashing into Oxygen Not Included’s resource anxiety, with a sprinkle of weird deadpan jokes on top. As for Graveyard Keeper 2, these 400,000 wishlists already prove one thing: as long as an indie game’s design is solid enough, an older title can still help ignite excitement for a new one.