7 on Steam’s Top Sellers chart. $49.99 price tag. Zero reviews. No player count. No launch day until June 5.

Gothic 1 Remake is selling on pure faith — and it’s working.

Alkimia Interactive’s Unreal Engine 5 rebuild of Piranha Bytes’ 2001 cult RPG doesn’t launch for another week, yet it’s already rubbing shoulders with the biggest games on Steam. That’s not algorithm manipulation or deep-discount bundling. That’s preorder demand at full price for a game most of the global market has never heard of.

And that’s the twist. Gothic was never a blockbuster. It was a European PC cult classic — the kind of game that defined a generation of German and Eastern European PC gamers while flying completely under the radar in the US and UK. Its signature move was hostility: no handholding, no quest markers, no map unless you bought one from a vendor for resources you couldn’t spare. You learned skills by finding teachers and bringing them specific items. You navigated by asking NPCs for directions and actually listening to the answer.

According to GamesRadar+’s hands-on preview, the remake preserves that friction. Quest logs are “more like a list of leads to follow up on with little mention of where I might find them.” You want lockpicking? Find a guy named Fingers, bring your own lockpicks, and hand over a stolen ring. That’s the tutorial.

THQ Nordic described the project as requiring “significantly more and constant iteration, improvement, analysis, reworking, optimization, and perfection than is required for many other games.” The release date shifted multiple times before landing on June 5, 2026 — one week from now.

The Collector’s Edition runs $199.99 and includes a 34x24cm Sleeper wall mask and a genuine leather wristband. Someone out there is buying that. Several someones, probably.

This is what a devoted fanbase looks like when you actually serve it instead of trying to widen the funnel. Whether Alkimia delivers on the promise is a separate question. But the money is already on the table.

Sources