Rain World has always made persistence feel less like a motivational slogan and more like a biological necessity. Videocult’s 2017 survival adventure casts players as a small slugcat in an ecosystem where nearly everything is more mobile, more dangerous and more capable of turning an ordinary expedition into lunch. Find enough food, reach shelter before the rain arrives, and perhaps live long enough to understand one more strange piece of its world.
Nine years later, the game itself has followed a similarly stubborn route. What began as a difficult, often opaque indie release has become a far bigger success through continuing updates, community activity, DLC, merchandise and an audience that includes both players and spectators. At the same time, the people now publishing the game say they hope to finally untangle Rain World from lingering connections to the largely retired Adult Swim Games label.
That legal and business resolution is not confirmed, and the precise details remain private. But Akupara Games CEO David Logan has indicated that discussions are ongoing and that the company believes it may be nearing an outcome that would let Rain World operate with full independence.
A survival game built around learning by disaster
Rain World’s reputation did not grow because it makes life comfortable for newcomers. The slugcat cannot simply dominate the landscape through a large move list or a pile of upgrades. It is vulnerable, awkward and hungry. Deadly rainfall imposes an additional clock, requiring a successful trip to end at a shelter rather than merely somewhere interesting.
That vulnerability is central to what distinguishes the game. Its environments are not just collections of obstacle courses waiting to be solved. Predators and other creatures behave in ways that can surprise the player, producing tense encounters where a tiny change in position, an improvised tool or a route discovered under pressure can matter enormously.
Players can use sticks in multiple ways, including as weapons and as tools to access new terrain. The game’s creatures can demonstrate similar uses through their behavior, meaning knowledge may come from watching an enemy do something alarming rather than reading an explicit tutorial prompt. It is a design philosophy that can be thrilling for players who enjoy observation and experimentation, while also explaining why Rain World has long been viewed as unusually demanding.
Later updates have added more approachable play styles and tutorial support, but the basic identity has held. Getting lost, dying repeatedly and losing progress are not side effects that the game tries to conceal. They are part of its harsh ecological fiction. That makes its commercial growth especially notable: Rain World is not a game designed around smoothing every sharp edge.
From uneven platform support to a unified release
Videocult launched Rain World in 2017 on PC and PlayStation 4 with Adult Swim Games as publisher. A Nintendo Switch version followed. For a period, though, the game’s support situation became confusing. Different platforms and regions received updates at different rates, leaving separate versions in circulation. At one point, PC was on version 1.5, consoles were on 1.7, and the PC release in Korea was on 1.8. Bugs and missing patches frustrated a community that had stayed invested despite the uneven treatment. An Xbox version that had been promised had also not yet arrived.
Related coverage includes Rain World Nears a New Chapter as Akupara Seeks Full Independence From Adult Swim Ties.
Akupara Games assumed publishing responsibilities in 2022 following extensive behind-the-scenes negotiations. One immediate priority was bringing versions into line with each other. That work addressed a foundational problem: a niche game with a committed fan base cannot easily sustain momentum if players on different storefronts and hardware are receiving fundamentally different support.
The publisher then broadened the effort well beyond maintenance. Rain World ultimately came to Xbox, and the team supported community-facing initiatives including art contests, livestreams and alternate reality game activities. Physical merchandise also became an important part of the game’s identity and business.
The approach was rooted in an obvious fact about Rain World: even before it became broadly successful, it had an unusually faithful community. Akupara’s leadership has described the game’s Steam concurrent-player peak as roughly 600 when it took over. That number was modest, but the players who remained had kept the game visible and alive through a turbulent stretch.
Downpour showed how large the audience could become
The turning point arrived with Downpour, Rain World’s first DLC, released in 2023 and adapted from a popular mod. The expansion pushed the game’s peak concurrent player count to 8,500. Its launch sales reached 186,000 units, based on figures shared by Akupara leadership.
A second DLC, The Watcher, followed in 2025. It raised the peak concurrent count again, to 15,500, while selling 128,000 units at launch. Those milestones tell a story bigger than a single expansion performing well: Rain World had become capable of rallying a sizable audience around new material years after its original release.
Sales of the base game have also accelerated. During one Steam Summer Sale, Rain World sold 1.3 million units while deeply discounted. Since Akupara took over publishing, total Rain World sales have reached 3.5 million units.
Those numbers stand out for a game whose challenge and limited onboarding are frequently part of the conversation. Akupara has acknowledged that median playtime is comparatively low. Yet a lower median does not mean the audience lacks passion. The active portion of the community is deeply engaged, and Rain World also attracts people who mainly watch streams, participate in fan spaces, or collect related items without regularly playing themselves.
Merchandise reflects that unusual breadth. Logan said revenue received from Rain World merchandise alone has passed seven figures, an outcome he contrasted with the much smaller merchandise returns commonly associated with other games in the publisher’s catalog. The slugcat has become a recognizable emblem for an audience that treats the game as more than a punishing survival challenge.
For another recent example of how game communities and the business around them can develop in unexpected ways, see Miami Beach’s vote on a proposed GTA 6 advertising arrangement.
Collector’s edition arrives as older publishing ties linger
Videocult and Akupara marked Rain World’s ninth anniversary with a livestream that included the reveal of a physical collector’s edition. It is a fitting symbol of the game’s changed status. A release that spent years building a reputation for inscrutability and ruthless survival now has enough long-term cultural and collector appeal to support a premium physical celebration.
But its publishing history is not completely cleanly separated from the past. Akupara holds Rain World’s publishing rights and license, yet the game still has residual ties to Adult Swim Games. Warner Bros. appeared to retire that publishing label in 2024. During that period, Adult Swim Games drew criticism over an initial proposal to delist titles it still published, a prospect that alarmed developers because it could complicate the availability and administration of their games. Following public pushback, publishing rights were returned to a number of developers, though not every case was resolved in the same manner.
Rain World’s remaining arrangement appears to be among the obligations still being addressed. Logan has stressed that he has felt close to a resolution before, so there is no guarantee that a final separation is imminent. Still, Akupara’s stated aim is clear: complete independence for Rain World and its creators from the remnants of the old publishing arrangement.
What comes after The Watcher?
Rain World will continue in some form regardless of how that process ends, Akupara says. More DLC seems less likely. After nine years of development and additions, Videocult has reportedly pushed the existing game close to its practical limits. That does not mean a sequel has been announced, however. When asked directly about a possible Rain World 2, the response was that nothing was being confirmed.
The most accurate expectation, then, is also the broadest one: the Rain World universe is not being put to sleep. Akupara has said it wants to pursue future projects connected to it, including games and ventures outside games. The collector’s edition, exceptional DLC response and enormous sale figures give that ambition a much firmer foundation than Rain World had during its early years.
For a game about a fragile creature surviving a hostile environment one careful cycle at a time, that trajectory feels appropriate. Rain World did not become a phenomenon by becoming easy to explain. It endured because its world, systems and community gave people reasons to keep returning, watching and creating long after many players might have expected its journey to end.
