Deep Rock Galactic: when shouting "Rock and Stone" into the echo chamber no longer works
Ghost Ship Games is officially speedrunning the destruction of their indie darling reputation. The recent May 20th launch of Deep Rock Galactic: Rogue Core is a massive wake-up call for a fanbase that has spent years actively suppressing any genuine criticism of the franchise. For a long time, all you had to do was yell "Rock and Stone!" and the toxic positivity of the community would drown out the complaints. Well, that protective shield has finally shattered.
The Steam reviews are currently floundering in the 50s on SteamDB, proving that even the most hardcore cult followers cannot hide how creatively bankrupt this new spin-off actually is.
A generic roguelite built on recycled assets:
Let us get the ugliest truth out of the way immediately. Rogue Core is barebones, and Ghost Ship Games has the absolute audacity to charge you £25 (around $30) to act as their unpaid alpha tester. You are paying a premium price for a game that literally copy-pastes roughly 80% of its assets directly from the original Deep Rock Galactic. We are talking about the exact same low-poly enemies, the exact same biomes, and the exact same visual language.
The developers completely stripped out the relaxing mining mechanics and shoved the remaining pieces into the most saturated genre on the market right now. Rogue Core is just a generic, timer-based action roguelite.
Competing against your own teammates:
The absolute worst mechanical decision in this game betrays the core identity of the franchise. Deep Rock Galactic built its entire reputation on brilliant cooperative synergy where players genuinely covered each other's weaknesses. Rogue Core actively throws that in the bin.
During your run, the game forces you to actually compete against your own team for upgrades.
The drafting system: When the loot drops, you have to literally fight your friends for the best gear.
Selfish survival: You are actively incentivised to hoard the strongest buffs just to survive the frantic pace of the timer.
Forced friction: It completely destroys the momentum of a run when your squad has to stop and bicker over who gets the next crucial stat boost.
Chasing trends to milk the IP:
This is exactly what happens when a studio decides to milk their IP by hopping onto whatever genre happens to be trending on Steam.
Do not forget Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor. The publishers saw the massive viral success of top-down auto-shooters like Vampire Survivors and quickly pumped out a clone using the exact same asset-flip strategy. Now that co-op action roguelites are the flavour of the month, they are repeating the exact same playbook with Rogue Core. It is exhausting to watch a studio with this much financial backing resort to churning out cheap derivative clones instead of designing something genuinely new.
✅ The Verdict
There are two very clear indie development trends on display here that I absolutely abhor.
First is the blatant, creatively bankrupt trend-chasing. Ghost Ship Games is looking at the Steam charts and just copying whatever sells.
Second, and vastly more damaging, is a studio genuinely believing their own myths. Ghost Ship Games allowed themselves to be completely isolated from reality by an echo chamber they built off one viral success. The Deep Rock Galactic community has functioned as a toxic positivity machine for years, blindly praising every minimal update and dogpiling anyone who dared to complain. The developers got so comfortable coasting on that unquestioning loyalty that they actually believed they could charge £25 for a recycled prototype and get away with it.
The fans are finally taking off the rose-tinted glasses. Yelling catchphrases cannot fix a fundamentally lazy game. Save your money, skip the Early Access, and let Ghost Ship Games learn a very necessary lesson about taking their players for granted.