Free games don't usually mean free money. Except, apparently, when they do.
tinyBuild CEO Alex Nichiporchik posted on X this week with a number that made a lot of developers stop scrolling: giving away Graveyard Keeper for free over a long weekend generated over $250,000 in revenue. From DLC sales alone. And that figure only covers Steam, since tinyBuild doesn't have the console numbers yet.
The math behind giving it all away
The setup was straightforward. From Thursday through Monday afternoon, Lazy Bear Games and tinyBuild made Graveyard Keeper, their 2018 medieval graveyard management sim, completely free to claim on Steam. Players flooded in. And a meaningful chunk of them didn't stop at the base game.
Here's the thing: Graveyard Keeper has three full DLC expansions, plus an official soundtrack and an art book, all available as a bundle. That bundle is currently on sale for $8.35 (80% off). For players who just got the base game for nothing and liked what they played, spending $8 to get the rest of the experience is a pretty easy decision. Multiply that across tens of thousands of new players and the numbers start making sense fast.
Nichiporchik put it plainly in his post: "So it makes sense when you have a lot of DLC."
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The Graveyard Keeper base game is no longer free but remains on sale at $3.99 (80% off) on Steam through April 17.
The real goal was 450,000 wishlists
The DLC revenue was a bonus. The actual reason tinyBuild ran the giveaway was to build momentum for Graveyard Keeper 2, which was announced on the same day the free period kicked off. The timing was deliberate, and it worked.
In a follow-up post, Nichiporchik shared that Graveyard Keeper 2 has landed on over 450,000 Steam wishlists, putting it inside Steam's top 100 most-wishlisted games. That's a significant position for a sequel to a seven-year-old indie sim, and it was built almost entirely off the back of one free weekend for the original.
For context on why wishlists matter: Steam's algorithm heavily favors games with large wishlist counts when it comes to featuring titles on sale pages, new release sections, and recommendation feeds. Getting into the top 100 before the game even has a release date is the kind of visibility that money spent on ads rarely buys as efficiently.
Graveyard Keeper 2 wishlist count
What this means for developers watching closely
The Graveyard Keeper giveaway is a clean case study in using a back catalog title as a marketing engine. The original game is six years old. Its sales curve had almost certainly flattened out. Running a free weekend cost tinyBuild the base game's sale price for however many players claimed it, but the DLC attach rate more than covered that, and then some.
What most players miss is that this strategy only works under specific conditions. You need a game with enough DLC or additional content that new players have somewhere to spend money immediately after getting hooked. You also need a sequel or upcoming release to funnel that new audience toward. Without Graveyard Keeper 2 on the horizon, the wishlist bump doesn't happen and the math looks different.
Graveyard Keeper 2 is due out later in 2026. For developers looking at their own aging libraries and upcoming releases, tinyBuild just ran a very public, very profitable experiment on what that combination can produce. For more on how publishers are approaching PC storefronts and DLC strategies, check our latest gaming news.
The sequel now has a massive wishlist head start and a fresh wave of players who know exactly what the series is. That's a launch position most studios spend years trying to build organically, and tinyBuild built it over a single weekend by charging nothing upfront. Keep an eye on Graveyard Keeper 2 as its release window gets closer, and check our latest reviews to stay across what's worth playing in the meantime.
