Here is last year’s action report on the Revolutionary Games Studio ry association.
Main Projects
Revolutionary Games Studio ry supported the development of the following open source projects in 2025:
Thrive
In 2025 there were 11 releases of Thrive, which is a bit higher than previous years and caused mainly by there being multiple patch releases needed. The first of these releases was 0.8.1 and the last one was the big 1.0.0 release which marked the completion of the Microbe Stage. Meaning that we managed to finally complete the first stage of the game after years of development, planning and the development team members rotating in and out. We had 26 open source contributors contributing to these releases, which is 3 more than in 2024, but we are still down from the peak in 2023. This still shows a positive direction, hopefully we can reach a new peak contributors per year again soon. The association had one full-time employee, who used most of their work hours on open source development of Thrive. The versions released in 2025 so far have been downloaded a total of 26,473 times for free through GitHub, which is about one thousand times more than in 2024. This slight upwards trend could be due to all the patch releases so we still aren’t reaching the highest number of downloads per year that we had in 2023 and before. Taken with all the other stats that will be presented later this shows that interest in Thrive is not at a very high level currently.
All of Thrive’s source code has been kept on GitHub where the programming development workflow also happens in the public. The Thrive releases have been staying small enough so that they could be uploaded to our GitHub page, where they are freely downloadable by anyone. And easily downloadable using our Launcher program.
The versions available through GitHub for free and the versions of Thrive made available on digital game stores were all supported with simultaneous new releases.
In terms of the paid versions that support the faster speed of continued open source development, there there was an opposite trend with the sales going up by 23% in 2025 compared to the previous year. That is very promising, however sales in 2024 were lower than previous years so we still aren’t in a positive income situation, which still means that we cannot afford a developer working on Thrive indefinitely.
Thrive Launcher
Thrive Launcher is a project to help in downloading and playing Thrive. The launcher had just 2 releases in 2025, which is a lot less than usual. The Launcher has not received that much attention recently as it does its job decently with no major changes needed. And also we haven’t had volunteers really working on it. The first version of the year was 2.2.0 which was a relatively large launcher update. The last version was a smaller patch release 2.2.1. So the launcher development still is pretty neglected, and we are back to a lower amount of activity after the slight increase in 2024. The versions released in 2025 had one developer contributing to it. We had a few more people working on the translations, but seeing more programmers contributing to the launcher would be good. The reason for the small number of launcher releases is that other work has always had higher priority than the launcher, and with no other code contributors there haven’t been more releases. So far the releases in have been downloaded a total of 22,489 times. That is about 12,000 less than the launcher release in the previous year (2024), which is a bit worrying multi-year downwards trend.
RevolutionaryWebApp
The scope of RevolutionaryWebApp was increased again this year. It is an open source project that has various tools and features for helping in Thrive development. In 2025 we finally managed to convert our main website over to this app so now it handles a lot of our online presence. The old features were still kept, like the features related to Patreon rewards distribution as well as Discord integration features. This project had just one contributor this year. Even if not a core part of the Thrive gameplay experience it’d be nice to get more volunteers helping out in improving this web application. We at least achieved the goal that starting in 2025 it is now much easier for any Thrive team member to write content for our main website.
Godot
Godot Engine is an open source game engine, and the engine that is used by Thrive. The Thrive developers have contributed some feedback and some code to the engine in the past. This was a pretty quiet year in terms of contributions to the engine, however we have reported a multitude of bugs to the engine that our players keep still experiencing in 2026 and at the time of writing are still not solved.
Community Platforms
The association continued supporting the community platforms and tools used for Thrive development. These were: the community forums, developer forums, Discord servers, source code repositories on GitHub, Thrive’s SubReddit, Thrive Wiki, community translations site, Revolutionary Games Studio’s website, and automatic code checking servers related to Thrive development. Association members or other volunteers selected by the association acted as moderators and administrators for these services keeping them running and as a good place for everyone by moderating the discussions. The community forums had 167 new users register in 2025 (about 10 more than the previous year) and a total of 38.5 thousand posts were made (about 20 thousand more than the previous year). This is again a slight upwards trend compared to the slow 2024. Especially the post count recovered dramatically back up to basically top years, however most of the posts are from just a few very active users. So the growth is not very secure and could drop down back to much lower levels quite easily.
Patreon
The association continued running the Patreon page made for supporting Thrive development. Exclusive content was produced to the members of the Patreon page and they got access to the Thrive development version (DevBuild) distribution system (a RevolutionaryWebApp feature) to get Thrive versions early, other benefits were also offered, access to DevBuilds and other benefits depended on the selected membership level on Patreon. In 2025 (and early 2026) the Patreon income has stayed relatively stable, though there was quite a major dip in the middle of 2025, but the Patreon income seems to be recovering somewhat, but we still are not reaching the highest funding amounts that we had in 2023.
Closing Thoughts
In terms of association operations, the year 2025 went very smoothly thanks to the association operating for many years already. The day to day activities and impact on Thrive was not very different from 2024. Thanks to being able to keep hold of our full-time developer for Thrive, the fast speed of Thrive development continued and we managed to hit the 1.0 milestone we set early in the year to complete it by the end. The drop in community activity was partially reverted in 2025 which is good, but there’s still some way to go for us to reach the previous highest activity peaks. However, the funding situation didn’t improve that much compared to 2024 so if the situation doesn’t improve soon we cannot afford to continue having a full-time employee working on Thrive. Hopefully with the planned completion of the Multicellular Stage in 2026 we can keep the upwards momentum and try to get Thrive back back to the popularity peak. The outreach push coinciding with 1.0.0 had many people contributing to it and we did get some results but not as much as many were hoping. Perhaps 2.0 release will also manage a decent enough outreach push? Lastly, we want to thank everyone participating in Thrive development or even just being in the community around the game this year and showing your support.