When we last checked in with Eleventh Hour Games and its debut title, the PC time-traveling action-RPG Last Epoch, it was an experiment built on the idea that a collection of Redditors could build a game.
That was back during Gamescom in 2023, when I interviewed Judd “Moxjet” Cobler, the CEO of Eleventh Hour Games. Fast forward to now and the game has crossed more than 2.5 million copies sold to date. Now the team is launching Season 2 for the game in a 1.2 update dubbed Tombs of the Erased.
And that’s a validation for Cobler, who led a merry group of diehard fans on a journey to build a community-created ARPG that took them through milestones like a Kickstarter campaign, early access launch on Steam, and an investment in Tencent.
Last Epoch gameplay is looking good.
Cobler’s humble ambition for his studio in San Antonio, Texas, was to create a title that could beat the best RPGs of all time, based on the passion of fans who decided to build the game themselves. The journey started in 2018, and now there are 105 people working for the company.
The game’s user base has grown, with 150% more users preparing for Season Two compared to Season One. The studio raised $17 million from Tencent in 2021, but Cobler said the company’s growth has meant that it hasn’t had to raise more. The game hit the 39th-higest concurrent user number ever on Steam. And so he’s still living the dream.
Judd Cobler is CEO of Eleventh Hour Games, maker of Last Epoch.
“We’re really excited about that. There’s a lot of a lot of hype in the community,” Cobler said. “We have a ton of videos being made,” he said. “We feel like a very significant amount of additional buzz happening around the game.”
It all goes back nearly six years ago. Out on the forums, Cobler expressed his love for these games. He and his friends would “get a little bit loud” about their preferences. When they tried to get the attention of the developers, they were “met with silence,” Cobler said.
Cobler dove in and started recruiting people on Reddit. He had no funding or game development experience. But he found talent, kicking off the studio with just eight people. They designed a version of the game that included their wishlist of features.
The 1.2 Last Epoch Season 2 update, Tombs of the Erased, is live.
And in their crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter. They set a goal of $210,000, and they raised $255,378 from 2,824 backers. That got them off the ground..
The game has time travel and both high fantasy and dark fantasy. You start off in the ancient era and move into the warring era of empires and a time w …