Guildlings

» see guildlings.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Sirvo was the studio Asher Vollmer built after Threes, the 2014 puzzle game that got cloned into 2048 within weeks and became the standard anecdote about how little protection a good mobile idea has. He co-founded Sirvo with Jamie Antonisse and Ryan Sullivan, then took money from the Indie Fund and grew the team to eleven people to make something much larger than a puzzle game.

Guildlings came out on 8 November 2019 as an Apple Arcade launch-window title, running on iPhone with Mac and Apple TV builds alongside it. It was a road-trip adventure about a group of teenagers in a world where magic runs through phones, and the combat was built around emotions instead of hit points. The writing was the point, and the reviews agreed: critics went after the tone and the dialogue rather than the systems, which is unusual praise for a mobile RPG.

It was sold as the first chapter of an episodic story. The second chapter never came.

~ the case file ~

~ chapter one ~

Antonisse said on X in 2023 that the remaining content had been canceled because the game had been a financial disappointment for Sirvo. The team had tried between 2021 and 2022 to continue the story in related concepts, and none of them shipped. Vollmer, separately, said in 2022 that he had come to feel the game was misaligned from his own design sensibilities, while praising the people who built it.

Those two statements explain each other. A studio founded on one person's design reputation, making a narrative adventure that reflected a different group's instincts, inside a subscription where nobody sees a sales figure. Under those conditions it took until 2023 for anyone to be able to say out loud that it had not worked.

~ the arcade deal ~

Apple Arcade in 2019 looked like the best offer in mobile games. A flat subscription fee with no in-app purchases anywhere in it, and an advance large enough that a small team could build something that had no chance on a storefront where everything costs nothing. Dozens of studios took it, and the catalog in that first year was genuinely good.

The cost was written into the same contract. An Arcade exclusive has no Steam page and no standalone paid version to fall back on. When Apple decides the title is no longer earning its slot, there is no second shelf to move it to, and the studio has to rebuild and re-release it as a new product or accept that it is gone.

~ the day it left ~

On 3 October 2024 Apple Arcade put Guildlings on its Leaving Soon list alongside four other games. On 17 October the studio's own account posted the confirmation: "Sadly, we're leaving Apple Arcade at the end of October," with a note that they would be looking for another way to make it available, and an invitation to adventure with the Guildlings one more time. By 1 November it was off the App Store. Nothing has replaced it since, and guildlings.com now returns a Squarespace page reading Website Expired.

Apple Arcade never had a real footprint in Turkey, where games reach people through free-to-play mobile and through Steam rather than through a subscription inside one company's hardware. So this is a game I could not have bought even if I had wanted to, and the reason I can still read about it is that the reviews outlived the product by years.

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