The Ranchers: 245,000 euros raised, four years of waiting, and an Early Access stripped of almost everything that made it exciting

Updated 8 August 2026. Our original review, published at launch, described an open world populated with mines and monsters and awarded a score of 7. On verification, none of that content is in the game: it appeared in the crowdfunding campaign and in the trailers, not in the shipped build. We repeated promotional material without checking it against the product. The article has been rewritten and the score revised accordingly. The error was ours, and correcting it is the least we can do.

The fantasy of dropping everything to raise chickens in the countryside has fed a whole industry. The Ranchers promised to add what its rivals lack: a real open world, fishing, hunting, mines, dungeons, wild islands, shipwrecks and monsters. A farming game that would also be an adventure.

The game launched into Early Access on 30 July 2026. None of that is in it.

What is left, and roughly works

Let us be fair before being harsh. There is a farming game inside The Ranchers, and it is not shameful. You buy plots of land, gather resources, turn them at the workbench into fences, sprinklers and greenhouses. You build barns and coops, raise animals, grow crops.

The management layer is even smarter than average: you optimise your ranch's consumption, sign water and electricity contracts or free yourself from them by building wells, wind turbines and solar panels, then sell your surplus to the village. Filling daily orders and selling at the market to balance the books holds up perfectly well.

The open world exists, with markets, boutiques, car dealerships, parks and a casino, and ways to get around on foot, by bike, in a pickup or a sports car. Four-player co-op works. For an evening with friends, asking for nothing more than a ranch to run together, you will have a decent time.

What is missing, and that was the whole point

Here is the problem, and it is enormous. Everything that was meant to separate The Ranchers from yet another farming game has vanished along the way.

No fishing, despite ten different fish being advertised, with an animation to prove it in the trailer. No hunting, also shown in footage. No mines, no dungeons, no wild islands, no shipwrecks, no monsters. The game's current Steam page no longer mentions any of these, which is an admission in itself.

The livestock has shrunk in the same proportions. Backers have catalogued what is missing: of twelve announced animals, three appear to remain. Horses, pigs, sheep, rabbits, llamas, ducks, peacocks, turkeys and ostriches are absent. On crops, of sixteen announced, roughly half are missing, including tomato, potato, grape and sweetcorn. The six promised fruit trees have not been found either.

These tallies come from backers themselves and we have not verified every line individually, but the structural points are confirmed: no fishing, no hunting, no mines. Players note in their reviews that the studio did not even display a message flagging that this content will arrive later.

The crowdfunding affair

This story needs telling, because it explains the anger you find everywhere around this game.

In July 2022, RedPilz Studio launched a Kickstarter for The Ranchers. The goal was 50,000 euros. It was met in under a day. By the close, the project had raised 245,544 euros from 3,629 backers, nearly five times the amount requested. A PC release was announced for late 2023.

The game arrived in Early Access on 30 July 2026. Almost three years late, in a state many players describe as very close to the demo that had been circulating beforehand.

The most delicate point concerns the team. In the Risks and Challenges section of the campaign, the developer wrote that after starting alone in 2016 he was fortunate to be backed by a whole team of passionate, talented people, and promised regular, honest communication along with a public roadmap to guarantee maximum transparency. The campaign displayed more than a dozen people at the time. Ethan Amyne now states he is the project's only full-time employee.

I will not call this campaign a lie, because that is an accusation for a courtroom, not a review. A studio can shrink, a project can derail, and none of that establishes intent to deceive. But the facts speak for themselves: a sum raised five times over target, three years of delay, a team gone from more than ten people to one, and a list of features promised in motion that are not in the product. Backers are entitled to be furious, and their complaints about community moderation, with posts deleted and questions about progress punished, do not help.

The state of the shipped build

Beyond the missing content, the finish is a problem. House building, a pillar of the game, is the most frequent target of criticism: awkward mechanics, and players report blockers, such as a roof the game refuses to register as finished, which halts progression outright.

The level of care shows in the details too: the first villager you meet is called Meriam, but the quest log calls her Merima. A typo on the very first character you encounter says a great deal about the proofreading.

The result shows in the reception. Steam reviews are Mixed, with 57 percent positive across more than 500 reviews, and only 51 percent among French-speaking players. For a game wishlisted by more than 350,000 people, that is a failure.

Should you buy it

No, not now, and not at 25 euros.

What works today is a decent co-op farming game with an interesting resource management layer. That already exists elsewhere, more complete and cheaper. What was supposed to justify the purchase, the adventure grafted onto the ranch, is not there.

The studio talks about roughly six months of Early Access. At the observed pace, with one person full-time, holding that schedule while adding fishing, hunting, mines, dungeons, monsters, nine animals and eight crops would be a feat. Several players openly fear abandonment, and given the sales and the score, the hypothesis is not absurd.

There is a foundation here, and a developer who could still turn this around, provided he communicates clearly about what is coming and what never will. We will revisit it. As things stand, we cannot advise anyone to pay for a promise whose essential parts have already been removed.

The discussion carries on over on our Discord, where we relitigate scores for far longer than is reasonable.