It is the most successful role-playing game on the German market, outselling "Dungeons & Dragons". Many years of work on the game have led to a detailed and extensively-described game world. Droemer Knaur dropped the project in early 1989; after the bankruptcy of the Schmidt Spiel & Freizeit GmbH in 1997, publishing was continued by Fantasy Productions (which had already done all the editorial work). Since the game's launch, the game has gone through five editions, making the rules and background more complex. The basic rules of the fourth edition of "The Dark Eye" were published in 2001, and was the first edition to be released in English (in October 2003). The fifth edition of the game was released in August 2015, with an English translation released in November 2016.