DwarfHeim

~ the goodbye ~

DwarfHeim took the real-time strategy game and divided up the job. One player mined and another built, while a third took whatever the two of them had made and went out to fight with it. The usual RTS skill of doing four things at once became a different problem: agreeing with two other humans about which four things were worth doing. Pineleaf Studio, out of Norway, put it into Steam early access on 22 October 2020 and released it in full on 27 September 2021.

That is a harder sell than it sounds. A cooperative RTS needs its players simultaneously and in the correct proportion, so one 3v3 match depends on five other people all being free at the same hour. Single-player existed and was thin, because the division of labor was meant to be the entertainment itself.

The players did not arrive in those numbers. The studio went into administration on 5 January 2022, three months after the full release, and its ten employees were laid off when the petition landed. Pineleaf had been nineteen people in 2020.

~ the chronicle ~

~ three players ~

The figure that explains the shutdown is in PC Gamer's coverage of it. Across the whole of 2023, DwarfHeim's average concurrent player count was slightly under three. Not three parties and not three matches. Three people, on a game that needed six of them to fill a single match of the mode it was designed around.

~ nobody had the source code ~

Merge Games posted the notice on 3 November 2023 and set the shutdown for the 30th. The explanation is unusually direct for a publisher statement: "Due to the way Dwarfheim was built it is not possible to play the game without servers, and without the development team, or the source code, there's no way we can patch in offline play."

So the publisher owned a game it had no way to open. Merge held the rights and the store page, and neither of those is the thing you need in order to change anything in it. The code went into administration with Pineleaf in January 2022 and never came back out in a form anyone at Merge could compile.

~ two years without a developer ~

The part that is easy to skip past is how long Merge kept paying. Pineleaf collapsed at the start of 2022 and the servers ran on until the end of November 2023, which is close to two years of hosting a game with three people on it and no possibility of ever improving it. The notice says only that continuing had become "no longer feasible".

Five other people at once was the entry fee here, and that is a price I could never pay. The strategy games I came up on ran against the computer on one machine, where the only calendar that had to cooperate was my own, so a design that needs five specific humans free in the same twenty minutes describes a hobby adjacent to mine rather than mine. DwarfHeim's version of that problem is also its gravestone, because the design needed people it never got, and the code that might have loosened the requirement was already lost by the time anyone needed it.

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