Graveyard Keeper 2 was announced this month at the Triple-I Initiative, and to celebrate that the original was made available free for a limited time. It’s a sensible way to get people familiar with the series and to build anticipation for the sequel, but there’s another upside to this kind of giveaway. As Alex Nichiporchik, CEO of publisher Tinybuild explained on Twitter, it’s earned “almost 250k usd from selling DLCs for the original.”

And that’s just on Steam, where the DLC is currently 80% off. (The giveaway for the base game has ended, I’m afraid.) The main purpose of the giveaway is to draw attention to the upcoming sequel of course, and that seems to have worked as well. In a followup tweet, Nichiporchik announced Graveyard Keeper 2 was in Steam’s top 100 most-wishlisted games, having been wishlisted 450,000 times.

It hasn’t all been good news for Graveyard Keeper 2. Slava Cherkasov, co-founder and CTO of developer Lazy Bear Games, posts a lot of pro-AI stuff like a defense of DLSS 5 based on the idea its critics just “hate full lips and makeup”, which has some players concerned that Graveyard Keeper 2 will replace its characterful style with something more generic and AI-generated. The developer ended up having to state that “we’re not using the AI in Graveyard Keeper 2.”

We’ll see how it turns out when Graveyard Keeper 2 comes out later this year. You can join the 450,000 people who have already wishlisted it on Steam.