Germany awards record €8 million to fund Rockfish's next Everspace game

Rockfish Games has landed the largest federal games-funding award ever handed to a German developer, and the money goes straight into the next Everspace project. The Hamburg studio said the €8 million grant will cover nearly 45% of a budget it puts at about €20 million, giving Michael Schade and Christian Lohr room to build a bigger game without surrendering ownership.

The payment will be spread over five years and tied to quarterly progress reporting, which makes this less like a lump-sum windfall and more like a long runway. Rockfish said it will self-fund the rest of the project so it can stay fully independent and keep publishing under its own name, a position that is increasingly rare once budgets climb into eight figures.

That independence is not coming out of nowhere. Rockfish rebooted in Hamburg in 2014 after its founders, Michael Schade and Christian Lohr, moved the studio away from mobile work and into PC and console games. The first EVERSPACE arrived with Kickstarter backing of about $475,000 in 2015, then went on to sell more than one million copies, while a separate industry tally puts the series at more than 2.4 million copies across PC and consoles. EVERSPACE 2 also won Best German Game at the Deutscher Computerspielpreis 2024, giving the studio a recent award-winning release before it went back to fund the next one.

The grant also says a lot about how Germany now wants its games sector to work. The federal program began in 2020 after a pilot phase, then grew sharply, with game - The German Games Industry Association noting that the budget rose to €88 million in 2025 and then to €125 million annually from 2026 onward. The Federal Ministry of Research, Technology, and Space says the scheme is meant to make Germany more attractive and competitive as a game-development hub, and it funds production and prototypes for games. In practice, that means public money is no longer just seeding tiny experiments; it is helping mid-sized studios like Rockfish hire, train, market, and scale while keeping their IP intact.

That is the real significance of the Everspace grant. Germany is not merely subsidizing a one-off project; it is building a model where a proven studio can stay independent, raise its production ceiling, and still ship something ambitious enough to matter in the broader PC and console market. For countries that want stronger local game industries, Rockfish is the case study worth copying.