Eleven-person Dundee studio tops global game charts with £6 simulator about running a Scottish ferry

A game about keeping a rusting car ferry running between a Scottish mainland port and three islands has become the best-selling title on the world’s largest PC games platform, three weeks after its release by a studio of 11 people above a bakery in Dundee.

Crossing, priced at £5.99, has sold 2.1m copies since 19 September, its developer Lochside Games said on Monday, outselling two major American titles released in the same month. Players manage the timetable, crew, fuel and maintenance of a single ferry on a fictional route, dealing with gales, engine failures, a stubborn lorry driver who will not reverse and islanders who turn up at the pier with increasingly pointed complaints.

The game has drawn comparisons with Euro Truck Simulator and the farming simulators that have found huge audiences by making mundane work compelling. Its appeal, reviewers suggest, lies partly in the strain of running an essential service with no money: the ferry in the game is 34 years old, the replacement is always three years away and the subsidy never covers the repairs.

“We were not trying to make a point,” said Lochside’s creative director, Morven Baird, 34, who grew up on Islay. “We were trying to make a game about a thing we all knew. It turns out a lot of people in a lot of countries know a version of it. We have had messages from Norway, Greece, the Philippines, British Columbia. Everybody has a ferry that is always broken.”

The studio was founded in 2022 by graduates of Abertay University’s games course, which has produced a string of small Dundee studios since the 1990s. Lochside previously released two games that sold about 40,000 copies between them. Crossing was made in 20 months on a budget of about £380,000, roughly a third of it from a Creative Scotland grant and a UK Games Fund award.

The success comes during a difficult period for the British games industry, which has shed about 3,000 jobs since 2023 as large publishers closed studios in Leamington Spa, Guildford and Edinburgh. Trade body Ukie said this year’s video games expenditure credit, which replaced the earlier tax relief, had helped smaller studios but that mid-sized firms were still struggling to fund projects.

The real ferry operator for the Hebrides, which is state-owned, said it had “no comment on the resemblance” but that several staff had bought the game. A spokesperson for the island council that covers the Outer Hebrides said the game was “uncomfortably accurate”.

Baird said the studio had received approaches from three publishers and “a lot of advice about what to do next”. It plans to add a Northern Isles route and, by popular request, a mode in which the player is the lorry driver. “We will stay in Dundee,” she said. “Above the bakery, if they will have us.”