The Forest

Both key figures come from Endnight itself, in one sentence of its November 2018 press release: 'built on an initial budget of 125k, The Forest has now sold over 5.3 million copies, making it one of the most successful independent game releases of all time.' At the $19.99 list price that is a return on the order of several hundred times the stated budget — and the studio was its own publisher, with no external funding, grant or publisher deal found anywhere. The game entered Early Access at $14.99 in May 2014 and rose to $19.99 when version 1.0 shipped in April 2018; the PS4 version launched at $19.99. Endnight has published no sales figure since November 2018 — no ten-million milestone, no franchise total, no revenue number — and third-party owner models diverge so wildly (roughly 16 million to 30 million) that they are useful only as an order-of-magnitude signal, never as a sales figure. Where the money kept coming from is visible in the concurrency data: the all-time Steam peak of 109,397 players landed on 28 December 2024, ten and a half years after Early Access began, driven by a 90%-off Winter Sale that put the game at $2. It still peaked near 19,000 players in June 2026.