DAVE THE DIVER surfaces on mobile as a full port

Dave has packed his harpoon. DAVE THE DIVER is out on mobile, three years after MINTROCKET's deep-sea adventure first surfaced on PC and roughly a fortnight after the studio announced it had sold ten million copies.

This is a full port rather than a shrunken spin-off. The App Store listing is explicit about the shape of the deal: download for free, play the opening portion, then unlock the whole game with a single purchase. That is the same try-before-you-buy structure MINTROCKET has used to widen the game's audience before, and it is a considerably friendlier introduction than asking phone owners to take a punt on a full price.

Same Blue Hole, smaller screen

Everything that made the PC game work is reportedly intact. You dive the Blue Hole by day with a harpoon and whatever weapons you have scrounged, catch fish, gather materials, watch an oxygen bar that punishes greed by making you leave your haul behind, and then convert the day's catch into a sushi restaurant menu at night. Upgrades are forged from gathered resources and restaurant profits, so a bad dive costs you both money and momentum.

The mobile build keeps the pixel-and-3D art mix, and MINTROCKET leans hard on the game's reception in its own store copy, quoting more than 130,000 reviews and a 96 per cent Overwhelmingly Positive rating. The PC version is still on Steam at £16.99, developed and published by MINTROCKET and released on 28 June 2023.

Ten million copies, then a new audience

The timing is not a coincidence. MINTROCKET announced on 9 September that DAVE THE DIVER had passed ten million copies sold across all platforms, with the In the Jungle expansion that launched in June 2026 passing a million sales of its own. Mobile is the obvious next pool, and specialist outlets had reported a 17 September mobile launch for iOS and Android in advance.

Our opinion

Mobile ports of PC hits are usually where a good game goes to be quietly ruined, so the interesting thing here is the business model rather than the port itself. MINTROCKET is not slicing the Blue Hole into a free-to-play grind with energy timers and a harpoon that costs gems, and it is not charging console money for a touchscreen version either. Free to start, one purchase to own is the most honest answer to the question every phone owner asks about a port, and it costs the studio the temptation to monetise impatience. The risk is that a game this dependent on slow, deliberate resource management feels cramped on a small screen, and the oxygen-pressure loop is not obviously improved by a thumb. But DAVE THE DIVER is fundamentally a game about making a modest living out of something beautiful, and that travels rather well to a device most people already carry.