After Years Of Legal Limbo, Brutal Indie Rain World Is Almost Free - Kotaku
So too has Rain World. For quite a while, the state of Rain World was a messy one. Rain World is a really weird game.
In 2017’s Rain World, the slow and clumsy slug cat struggles out of its burrow and into the world. It cannot climb; it can barely jump. Food is scarce. Almost everything its size and bigger is a predator that is faster and stronger than it, and will consume it without a thought. If it does not fill its belly and find shelter in time, deadly rains will kill it.
And yet, the slug cat persists. So too has Rain World.
I first fell in love with Rain World about five or six hours into trying to review it early in my career. What did it for me was watching an enemy pick up a stick I’d been muddling around with prior to spotting it, and yoink the stick across the map at me like a spear, pinning me to a wall. The enemy caught me, and I died. But on my next run, I found another stick, and was able to do the exact same thing myself, using the stick as a platform to climb to areas I hadn’t been able to reach before. The game never showed me how; my enemies did, silently and by accidents of their AI.
Rain World is such a wonderful, weirdo game, it’s not surprising to me that it took a long time to really find its audience. Years, even. Developer Videocult first launched it nine years ago, in 2017, with the now-essentially-defunct Adult Swim Games publishing it on PS4 and PC, and eventually porting it to Nintendo Switch. For quite a while, the state of Rain World was a messy one. Different platforms in different regions received inconsistent updates. At one point, the game was at version 1.5 on PC, 1.7 on consoles, and, inexplicably, 1.8 on PC in Korea. A promised Xbox edition had yet to manifest. There were bugs not getting patched effectively, and a lot of reasonably grouchy yet persistent fans.
In the midst of all this, Akupara Games CEO David Logan and head of publishing Buddy Sola were a newly-formed work-for-hire company looking for clients. They saw the state of Rain World, and, like a slug cat, pounced.
“From my perspective with Adult Swim, things were just sort of stagnant,” Logan says. “You know, they weren’t moving up. They weren’t moving down. They were sort of just, you know, the community was really maintaining the live ops for the game and maintaining, but it was like a small, low-burning flame. And we threw fuel on the fire and ignited the fire and made it really take off.”
Thus Akupara Games took over publishing for Rain World in 2022, after a lot of behind-the-scenes legal back-and-forth.Their first goal was to get all the versions of the game consistent with one another. But once that was done, they wanted to do more. When Akupara took the helm, Logan and Sola tell me, the all-time peak concurrent player count in Rain World was around 600. It was not a widely popular game, but it did have an extraordinarily devoted community that had stuck around through some rough times, which suggested to them that Rain World could be pushed farther. They leveraged that community for the game’s first DLC in 2023, Downpour, which was adapted from a popular mod. Their team began holding community events: art contests, live streams, ARGs. They sold physical merchandise. They released the game on Xbox at last. And the community responded to these things, far more strongly (say Logan and Sola) than communities for other games they had published.
Downpour brought the peak concurrent player count to 8,500. The second DLC, The Watcher, in 2025 got them to 15,500. Logan and Sola tell me the first DLC release sold 186,000 units, and the second sold 128,000 at their respective launches. Recently, during a single Steam summer sale, Rain World itself sold 1.3 million units on deep discount, and its sales since Akupara took over have reached 3.5 million total.
To me, this is nuts. Rain World is a really weird game. It’s harsh. It doesn’t explain itself much, but rather unfolds bit by bit as you play and observe. You die a lot, and lose progress, and restart, and get lost, and sometimes are put in unwinnable situations. Various updates over the years have offered easier playstyles and more tutorials, but at its core, Rain World is brutal and inscrutable. I express this surprise to Logan and Sola in our interview, and they admit that the median playtime on Rain World is pretty low. But those who do play actively are very invested, and they find their community has a surprisingly large population of individuals who don’t play at all themselves; they watch streamers instead, but still buy merchandise and show up in community spaces.
“We have now generated over seven figures in revenue just on merch alone, which is wild, because most of our games are doing, like, low thousands in merch,” Logan says. “And so, over seven figures was just phenomenal. And that’s what we’ve received as the revenue, so, I’m guessing it’s, like, even eight figures at this point.”
I spoke to Logan and Sola ahead of the game’s ninth anniversary livestream, during which Videocult and Akupara Games announced a shiny new physical collector’s edition for this nine-year-old sicko game that I would not have, in a million years, thought would get something like this when I first played it in 2017. But more interesting to me is what’s going on behind the scenes simultaneously: Logan and Sola tell me that despite Akupara owning the publishing rights and license, Rain World is still quietly tied to Adult Swim Games, or whatever remains of it after WB seemingly retired the label in 2024 (we’ve reached out to WB for comment). At the time, Adult Swim Games was under fire for its initial plan to simply delist all the games it still published, a move that would have created chaos and headache for developers. After an outcry, the company eventually returned publishing rights to a number of (not all) developers.
With that, it seems that WB is actively trying to offload any remaining obligations or ties left behind by what remains of the label, and that includes its remaining ties to Videocult and Rain World. The folks from Akupara wouldn’t get into specifics, but Logan says he thinks an end is in sight.
“Recently we’ve continued talking, and we hope we are close to a resolution with them,” he says. “That said, I also reached out to you a couple years [ago] with I think a similar story to this, and I thought we were close at that point as well, so we are hoping that we can be fully independent.”
Regardless of outcome, Rain World will continue, say Logan and Sola, in some fashion. Likely not in the form of more DLC. They tell me that Videocult has effectively pushed the game to its limits; it’s nine years old, they can only fit so much stuff in it. I asked after a Rain World 2, and Sola said, “That is not something that we are confirming.”
But something, to be sure. “We want to continue to do things, including games, including not games,” Logan says.
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