I haven’t touched Grim Dawn in ages, but it will always have a special place in my heart. I first wrote about it 16 years ago (for a completely different site), when Crate Entertainment was fiddling around with something called “crowd contributed” game development: Give people an opportunity to pay now so they can play later, and kick in a few extras to make it worth their while. It took longer than expected to come out—instead of arriving in 2011 as planned, Grim Dawn launched in 2016—but the end result was well worth the wait.
Crate Entertainment has stuck with it since, adding two expansions, a handful of smaller DLC, and numerous updates, and despite not having the cachet of, say, Diablo or Path of Exile, Grim Dawn remains a big favorite among fans of the action RPG genre, racking up a “very positive” user rating across nearly 88,000 user reviews on Steam. But with yesterday—February 25—marking the game’s 10th anniversary, it’s finally time to wrap things up.
“It’s wild to say that, 10 years ago today, an upstart studio shipped a little game called Grim Dawn,” Kamil “Zantai” Marczewski wrote on the Crate forums (via GamesRadar). “What’s mind-blowing to us is that that game went on to not only become a success beyond our wildest dreams at the time, but to become a staple in the ARPG genre.
The only downside to the whole thing is that a release date for Fangs of Asterkarn still hasn’t been set—but its launch will really and truly be the end: “We know for certain that this time it will be Grim Dawn’s final hurrah,” Marczewski wrote. But it’s going out strong.
“When we wrap up Fangs of Asterkarn, Grim Dawn will not be going out with a bang, it will be a tremendous roar that will cement the game as a cornerstone of the ARPG genre,” he wrote. “We are immensely proud of everything that’s in store for you and can’t wait to get it into your hands in just a few months.”
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