Hello Riftbreakers!
It’s almost the end of 2025, and all we can say is: “Wow, what a year it has been”! The main highlight was, of course, the August release of The Riftbreaker 2.0 Update, featuring Online Co-Op mode. It was the finishing touch on our multi-year journey, reworking the single-player game into a fully featured, stable, and most of all, fun multiplayer experience. We can’t possibly express our gratitude to you for the fantastic reception of The Riftbreaker 2.0 Update. All we can say is that you showed us it was worth it, and it will fuel us for years to come. Today, we’re taking a look back at 2025, sharing the most significant highlights, most interesting stats, and what we’re going to do moving forward.
Let’s kick things off this year with a portion of stats and facts about the development process itself:
Like we mentioned in our previous yearly roundups (here’s the one from 2024 if you’re interested), the majority of our work is stored in two repositories: The Riftbreaker game repository, which holds the game’s assets and data, and the Schmetterling Engine repository, holding all the code that is later compiled into the actual program you can run on your system. The stats for these two repositories look like this:
The Riftbreaker:
- We started the year on revision number 50473. The last change in 2024 shortened the duration of the acid explosion effects.
- At the time of writing, we are on revision 56722. This revision contains nothing of interest; it’s purely technical.
- This means there have been 6244 commits to the repository, averaging 716 per month.
- Commits themselves do not tell the whole story, as they often contain multiple file changes and additions. This year, we made a total of 55501 file changes.
Schmetterling Engine:
- We began 2025 on revision number 31536. That revision fixed duplicate event handlers in the engine’s event queue.
- We are finishing the year on revision 32826, reverting a try fix for a bug in GuiItem. We’ll nail it next year.
- A total of 1291 commits were made to the engine repository over the course of the year, averaging 171 per month.
- The total number of file changes in 2025 is 17578.
As is often the case, interesting insights emerge when we present this data as graphs.
There are clear four peaks on The Riftbreaker graph - that usually happens when our work intensifies and we are doing a lot of bugfixing.
The peaks for the engine are more or less aligned with the graph for the main game.
These graphs show the number of commits over time. The higher the peak, the more changes made. Naturally, the number of changes increases as a milestone approaches, due to increased focus on testing and bug fixing. There are four of these peaks on The Riftbreaker repository graph, which align with our four story arcs of the year: Co-Op Closed Beta development process, the Co-Op Open Beta launch, the launch of the complete 2.0 Update, and the work we’re doing now on the Dedicated Server and the World Expansion IV.
A 'beautiful' scene from one of our earliest multiplayer builds. Shadows pop in and out of existence, many effects are missing, players move as if they were submerged in syrup, all marinaded in hundreds of millisceonds of delightful lag (on LAN). Good times! May they never come back.
At the beginning of the year, we began distributing more invitations to the Closed Beta version of the game to volunteers who signed up via our form. We increased the scale of the operation by an order of magnitude. Instead of manually serving keys to anywhere between 50 to 100 people every couple of weeks, we started sending out thousands of keys each week. Thanks to Discord's anti-spam mechanisms, this process would take a long time. This is why we started using emails instead (and started a mailing list! This allows us to share information unrelated to The Riftbreaker and not necessarily tied to a single platform, so if you’re interested, consider signing up! You’ll get a bonus Mr. Riggs skin as a welcome gift). By the end of April 2025, we have distributed keys to everyone who signed up to test the Beta, for a total of 12075 unique users. We sent each user a pair of keys so that they could immediately gift one to a friend and start playing. If someone wanted more, we gave it to them. Overall, we distributed more than 25000 beta keys during our closed testing period. Massive thanks to each and every one of you - your help and feedback shaped the final release.
Once we started the Closed Beta, each build brought back another portion of features known from the single-player version. In this example, the game runs like a geriatric tortoise with a broken leg, but at least it looks half-decent!
In mid-June, we released the experimental build of the 2.0 Update, marking the start of the Open Beta test for the game. This was the final proving ground before the official release, and one that we were pretty anxious about. The thing is, even if the game worked perfectly fine for us, there are virtually infinite network and PC configurations you would try it on. We expected lots of errors, crash bugs, and connection issues. However, things looked suspiciously okay, and not for the lack of trying on your part - over the course of the next couple of days after release, the number of concurrent players consistently increased, peaking at more than 2800. Yet, the game just worked. Thanks to the thorough testing during the closed beta phase, we managed to fix most of the errors. We estimate that about 200,000 players participated in all of the closed and open Beta phases that we held for The Riftbreaker 2.0 update. All that was left was the final polish in preparation for the big day.
Let's not forget the unsung hero of the entire Co-Op project: our PvP connectivity test. You have no idea how much useful data we got from your participation. We know this didn't happen in 2025, but it laid the foundation for what would eventually happen. Press F for the accidental PvP mode.
In the blink of an eye, we were there. August 25th, 2025. We knew we had a solid game on our hands. We knew that the work we’ve done was good. The question was - would the players care after almost four years of waiting? Was ‘coop when’ just a meme, or were you truly excited for it? We hoped that the new content and the free update would attract both new and returning players. Our optimistic predictions assumed a slight uptick during the Open Beta and enabled us to reach 4000 concurrent players on Steam.
We didn’t. We peaked at 18775 - only 3000 fewer than at launch.
EXOR team realizing that people cared, even after all this time. 2025, colorized.
The Riftbreaker received a second life. Thousands of players, new and old, began their conquest of Galata 37 - together. You broke milestone after milestone. One million copies sold on Steam - smashed. Two million players across all platforms and subscription services - done and dusted. To say that we were ecstatic is an understatement. We kept our promise of expanding our single-player game with a co-op mode, and you showed up for us when we did. Thank you!
Thank you for years of support. We know it took longer than expected and you had to go on 'trust me bro' all this time. We hope that you are satisfied with the result. We know we are!
Initially, we planned the 2.0 version to be the last update for the game. We expected that many of you would appreciate the effort, but it wouldn’t be enough to make further work on The Riftbreaker feasible. We were ready to move on to something new. Oh, how wrong we were! Your continued support and love for the game convinced us to extend The Riftbreaker’s story with a couple more World Expansions. The World Expansion IV is just around the corner - it will feature a new game mode, which we call Open Campaign (you can learn about it here), a new biome, and it’s entirely free! It will arrive in early 2026. World Expansion V will focus on an endless form of Survival Mode, with creatures scaling way past what we are used to. The expansion will also be free, and the release date is to be determined.
This is one of our favourite scenes we captured for the Co-Op trailers. Lasers Swords flying left and right, tons of Mushbits being eradicated, countless pieces of debris - pure chaos.
This is how we arrived at our latest story arc: by working on the Dedicated Server app, World Expansion IV, and improving the game based on your feedback. We initially planned to release the Dedicated Server alongside version 2.0, but encountered more issues than anticipated; you can read all about them in our progress report. By the time you read this, we will likely have published the first version of the app to the experimental branch for you to try.
We’re looking forward to your feedback! We have also started previews of the content you can expect to see in World Expansion IV. You can expect them to continue after we are back from our holiday break.
We are taking a couple of weeks off. We expect most of the team to be back on January 7th. It's quite close to our planned release date for World Expansion IV, so we're gonna have to go into the year like these mechs - no hesitation, no fear, push forward!
2025 was a huge year for us - one that sets our course for the foreseeable future. 2026 is going to be our eighth year of work on The Riftbreaker, that’s a big, happy chunk of life :) If you want to know what we are planning next, please join our newsletter here and hop into the Discord server at https://www.discord.gg/exorstudios. We’ll keep you up to date - you can be sure about that!
We wish you a great holiday period and a fantastic start to the new year!
EXOR Studios