Journey – ROCKFISH Games GmbH

Our Journey

Michael Schade and Christian Lohr are joint serial entrepreneurs with a background in mechanical engineering. They pioneered in 3D CAD on SGI workstations in the early 90s when studying machine engineering at the Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg.

The duo started their career by founding a CGI studio for 3D architectural visualization in 1993 and had worked for star architects and publicly listed real estate companies on major projects like BMW Headquarters in Munich, Sony Center in Berlin, or Munich Airport Terminal 2, just to name a few.

In 2004, they founded Fishlabs Entertainment, spearheading 3D mobile gaming for almost a decade with dozens of award-winning titles under their belt. Together with their veteran team, they were best known as creators of the critically acclaimed space shooter Galaxy on Fire 1 & 2 with over 30 million installs. Through several dramatic events, they had to leave the studio empty-handed at the end of 2013, though.

In 2014, they started all over and founded ROCKFISH Games to enter the digital PC and console gaming space together with their former core team, fueled by a tier 1 console publisher deal to create a co-op space shooter in Unreal Engine 4. After nine months, the project was greenlit for full production with a team of 30+ for another two years, but was canceled later the same day, presumably because of another space game that took the headlines by storm around that time.

In 2015, the team started from scratch and did a wildly successful Kickstarter, raising €420K for EVERSPACE, a roguelike 3D space shooter with AAA audio-visuals and clever storytelling. It was self-published on Steam Early Access and Xbox Game Preview in 2016. The title graduated as one out of 12 Platinum games of Steam Early Access in 2017, hitting PS4 and Switch in 2018, with over 2M units been sold, so far.

Doubling down on over a decade of making cutting-edge space shooters, ROCKFISH Games did another wildly successful Kickstarter raising €500K for EVERSPACE 2 to make the leap from a linear, roguelike space shooter to a semi-open-world space action RPG with looter-shooter mechanics in 2019. The title has been a great success on Steam Early Access with 200K copies sold and 90% positive reviews and has also been added to Microsoft’s Games Pass for PC in 2021. The full release on PC, Xbox, and PlayStation is scheduled for early 2023.

At ROCKFISH Games, we have a active policy against crunch. While the few weeks leading up to a major launch can occasionally require extra hours, we keep overtime limited and ensure it is fairly compensated. Our core team has been working together under consistent leadership for over 20 years, with few departures—a testament to the supportive, respectful, and sustainable studio culture we’ve built and continue to uphold.