Frankly, I’m scared. It feels like just yesterday I went to sleep in a world in which the phrase “Dave the Diver” was no more than a meaningless burble. A reference, perhaps, to the speaker’s mate Dave, who dives. Now look at us. The whole world is in the hot grip of Dave-mania: The game has an “overwhelmingly positive” Steam user review score, and developer Mintrocket has just announced it’s already sold over a million copies.
A million! I don’t think I’ve done anything a million times, and I’ve been out for way longer than Dave the Diver. And yet, apparently, the game sold “over a cumulative 1 million copies” in its first 10 days on the market, in which time it also hit 98,000 concurrent users, 66,000 Twitch viewers, climbed to the global #2 spot on Steam’s top sellers chart, and comprehensively dominated the PC Gamer staff Slack.
I think we’ve got a phenomenon on our hands, folks. Dave the Diver seems to be doing in 2023 what Vampire Survivors did last year, popping up out of nowhere to ambush bestseller charts and take our hearts by storm. It’s earned its success. The game’s potent blend of spearfishing and sushi-serving is, apparently, sating a secret hunger that the videogame-playing public has been harbouring for years.
It’s even got renowned cinematic hater Chris Livingston pining for more cutscenes, which is a perturbing new reality we’re all just going to have to learn to live with.
I’m gonna go ahead and prophesy that Mintrocket won’t rest on its laurels with this one, and that there’s probably a great deal more Dave the Diver to come. Over on Steam, the devs put out a celebratory news post thanking their 1,000,000+ new fans, promising that they remain “committed to carefully listening to your opinions and continuously adding enjoyable and exciting content”. A little vague, perhaps, but I imagine they might be as surprised by the game’s overnight success as anyone.