Alpha-funded Steam game abandoned by Devs
It seems that this is not Valve’s couple of days. Only a bit over 24 hours have passed since Valve was forced to remove a game from Steam for deceitful marketing, and now another issue has arisen: the well-publicized in-alpha game Towns has lost its development backing.
Back at the end of 2012, just before the Early Access program launched, one of the first games to pass through Steam Greenlight, Towns, promised a city building/management game with RPG elements. Now developer Florian Frankenberger, who only joined the team months ago, has admitted that the game isn’t producing the expected sales figures, and that development has been indeed abandoned.
More so, the team is considering a sequel to the unfinished title, in which they plan to implement features that have not made it in to the current product available on steam. Frankenberger took on the project after former developer Xavi Canal said that he was “burned out” and could no longer continue.
As is to be expected, backers and supporters of the game aren’t too pleased, as a high volume of negative user reviews have popped up on Steam, not to mention numerous negative replies to Frankenberger’s forum post. Towns has already sold over 200,000 copies and generated a gross revenue of more than $2 million. It remains to be seen how Valve plans to handle this abandoned Early Access game. As of writing this piece, the game is still available via Steam despite the lack of future development plans.