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A long time coming! The popular pixel-art village building sim that gives you god powers, Rise to Ruins, has now launched DRM-free on GOG.com. This is after officially leaving Early Access in October 2019, and going on to gross over $2 million USD back in September 2020.

"Rise to Ruins is at heart a godlike village simulator, but it also throws in plenty of familiar game play mechanics from classic real-time strategy and resource management games like Black and White, Settlers, ActRaiser and many others. It also throws in some twists by melding in some tower defense and survival elements in an attempt to create a new kind of godlike village simulator. The goal is to try to bridge the gap between the depth and complexity of traditional village simulators, the fun of godlikes and tower defense, with the simplicity of real-time strategy games."

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Rise to Ruins shows how deceptive user review counts are too if you rely on them to figure out popularity. It currently has 5,381 user reviews on Steam, which I would never have guessed behind the scenes that would end up grossing so much for a developer. It's clearly still selling really well too! For those interested in some sales stats: through 2020 alone up to near the end of October it grossed close to $300K from 36,702 sales (source), with Linux making up around 1.8% of 2020's sales for it on Steam.

SixtyGig Games which is just solo developer Raymond Doerr is worth supporting for their stance too, as they promise to keep it DRM-free with all additional content being free updates (no paid DLC). Their continued Linux support is great too.

Now you can buy it on GOG.com with 50% off until 20th November 2020, 2 PM UTC if that is your preferred store. Also available on Steam and itch.io.

What do we think about it? It's great, well worth picking up!

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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5 comments

TheSHEEEP Nov 6, 2020
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More than 5% of reviews is actually incredibly much.
The general guideline for reviews to sales is actually that less than 5% leave reviews.

For RoR that would make it more than 10% reviews. Impressive!
Liam Dawe Nov 6, 2020
Quoting: TheSHEEEPMore than 5% of reviews is actually incredibly much.
The general guideline for reviews to sales is actually that less than 5% leave reviews.

For RoR that would make it more than 10% reviews. Impressive!
It's a very tricky thing to calculate, and each person I've seen attempt to do so has some different outcome and method to try. It ends up varying a lot. In this case, when you look at total sales (first link) from September over the lifetime it would give less than 2% that left a review for RoR.
TheSHEEEP Nov 6, 2020
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Quoting: Liam Dawe
Quoting: TheSHEEEPMore than 5% of reviews is actually incredibly much.
The general guideline for reviews to sales is actually that less than 5% leave reviews.

For RoR that would make it more than 10% reviews. Impressive!
It's a very tricky thing to calculate, and each person I've seen attempt to do so has some different outcome and method to try. It ends up varying a lot. In this case, when you look at total sales (first link) from September over the lifetime it would give less than 2% that left a review for RoR.

My bad.
I read the article wrong, didn't see that those numbers were "only" in 2020.

That sounds much more in line with what I know (<5% reviews in general).

It is of course never an exact calculation. Some games ask their users to write a review within the game, others don't.
Some might have users that for some reason are more likely to write reviews, etc.


Last edited by TheSHEEEP on 6 November 2020 at 4:08 pm UTC
slembcke Nov 6, 2020
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Oh neat! I grabbed a copy of this for my business partner. Looks like a fully fleshed out version of a gamejam game that he made years ago. Inspired by many of those same games, but had like 10 minutes of content since it was for a jam. ;)
ronnoc Nov 9, 2020
Great game and great value! Recommended, whether purchased on Gog or Steam.
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