Summary
Everybody’s talking about it – the year’s two most beloved, critically acclaimed games about catching fish are going to be joining forces for a crossover. On December 15, a free update will bring elements of Dredge, a creepy horror fishing simulator, into Dave the Diver, a deep sea exploration roguelike crossed with a restaurant management simulator. In the update, we’ll get a new ‘fog’ weather event and be able to drive Dave’s boat and choose different diving spots, catch Aberrations, explore a new night map, make a new weapon called a ‘Drain Gun’ from Aberrant material, and serve new types of customers.
You don’t need to think too hard about it to realise this collaboration is extraordinarily obvious. Despite these two games being extremely different in gameplay, tone, genre and narrative, countless comparisons have been drawn between them because they were both unexpected hits, and they’re both fishing games. Though one technically is a spearing game, because you use a harpoon gun, not a fishing rod, but those are semantics. Also, both are largely considered indie darlings,despite one of them not technically being an indie, but I digress.
Same Story, Different Games
The announcement didn’t surprise me at all. Crossovers are nothing new, especially in today’s economic climate – live-service gamesconstantlyhave expensive crossovers with other IPs in order to create novelty around skins and boost sales. I do believe that there are good crossovers and bad crossovers, though. Inthis piece about Among Us’ recent crossover collaboration with a group of other indie games, I concluded that Among Us’ crossover was great, because it was using its huge platform to promote other indies, and you don’t even have to shell out for its cosmetic bundle – you can buy items with a currency easily earned just from playing games.
This crossover is great too. Dave the Diver is a runaway hit, buoyed by the financial and infrastructural support of its parent company Nexon. Dredge has had somewhat less exposure – just going off the number of Steam reviews both games have received, Dredge has amassed over 21,000 since March and Dave the Diver has over 75,500 since June. Clearly, Dave the Diver has more exposure, but both games sold over a million copies within months of release. Neither are hidden gems anymore, they’re just gems. But by putting Dredge in Dave the Diver, and not vice versa, Black Salt Games is very cleverly raising its game’s profile, and Mintrocket gets to bolster its credibility as a studio that supports indies, and it’ll bring lapsed and new players into the fold. Win-win!
But, ultimately, it was inevitable. Studios, after all, have to make money. A crossover between two of the most successful ‘indie’ releases of the year was bound to capitalise on existing hype enough to work as great marketing. It’s the most obvious of ideas. That doesn’t make it bad, by any means. I’m actually thrilled to dip into a free update that combinestwo games that made it onto my GOTY list. It’s just an interesting case study of two very different developers coming together over their two very different games, because they happened to have similar settings and released in the same window.
