Boundary

~ the eulogy ~

Boundary was a tactical shooter set in orbit, where every player wore a suit and nothing had a floor. Studio Surgical Scalpels showed it as Project Boundary at a PlayStation press conference in China on 27 July 2016. It reached early access on Steam on 13 April 2023, six years and eight months later.

It sold more than 100,000 copies in its first day. The Steam rating settled at Mostly Positive inside two weeks, and the complaints in the negative reviews were about balance and server quality rather than about the idea, which is the better kind of bad review to get.

Fourteen months after that it was gone. Skystone Games, which had published the game internationally since early 2021, announced on 19 June 2024 that it was giving up the rights, citing delays and an absence of content updates. The developer answered the same day on the same page. Network functions stopped at the end of June and Steam delisted the game on 2 July 2024.

~ the dossier ~

~ announced before it was built ~

The gap is the first strange thing here. Most of seven years passed between the reveal and a build anyone could buy, and the shooter market it had been announced into changed underneath it in that time. Boundary was shown in 2016, when the genre still had room for a mid-sized entry, and it shipped in 2023 into a field that had already buried most of them.

~ the fight over the rights ~

Skystone's statement said the developer had been unable to deliver the necessary updates and improvements. Surgical Scalpels called the decision extremely sudden and said it had never recovered the income it was owed. It added that it would pursue the matter through negotiation and legal means. Players read both statements and review-bombed the game, which was the only lever available to anyone outside the argument.

On 2 July, the day the store page came down, Skystone's name was removed from it and replaced with Huya Games, the Tencent-owned company that had always published Boundary in Greater China. The developer said it had resumed the publishing rights and had chosen to stop all services rather than keep running the game in the state it was in. It also said it was preserving player account data for a relaunch. That was more than two years ago and no relaunch has come.

~ what floats away ~

What Boundary was trying to do deserved better than the ending it got. A shooter with no ground plane breaks the habits every other shooter spends its tutorial building. There is no cover in the usual sense and no high ground to take. Aiming while tumbling is a separate motor skill, and acquiring it took real hours.

Every shooter I ever learned had a floor under it. The vocabulary was about holding a corner and watching an angle, on maps where up was a direction almost nobody used and every argument came down to a fixed position somebody was supposed to be covering. Boundary asked players to throw all of that away in 2023, two decades into those habits. It is not a harder version of the game I knew, it is a different sport, and the handful of people who put in those hours were playing something I never went and learned.

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