Spellbreak

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

~ the goodbye ~

nothing had gone wrong with the game when the end was announced. it had put up five million players in under three weeks at launch and was still shipping chapters two years later. what happened instead was that blizzard wanted the people who worked at proletariat. the acquisition went public on 29 june 2022 and the studio was folded into the team that maintains world of warcraft. the game those people had spent three years building was not really part of the transaction.

spellbreak came out free on 3 september 2020 for windows, playstation 4, xbox one and nintendo switch, with cross-play running between all four. it was a battle royale that had removed the guns. one elemental gauntlet stayed permanently attached to your arm and a second could be picked up off the floor, and the entire combat system lived in what happened when two elements touched each other. toxic gas that has been sitting in a doorway behaves differently once somebody throws fire at it. mana was shared between casting and levitating, so going up in the air cost you the ability to fight while you were there.

the numbers arrived quickly and then stopped arriving. two million players in the first five days, then five million by 23 september. twitch carried four million hours of it in the same window. reviews landed at 79 on pc and 71 on switch, which is the spread of a game that was better on the hardware fewer people had. chapter 2 in april 2021 replaced the team deathmatch mode with dominion, a five against five fight over control points, and the sense from outside was of a studio still trying to find which game it had actually made.

in 2020 i was thirty-six and writing computer vision code for a living. free-to-play battle royale had already passed me by twice over, once on genre and once on the amount of evening it asks for. what i can say from this distance is that the shape of the ending is the interesting part and it is not a games story at all. a company was valued at the cost of rehiring its engineers, and the thing those engineers had built was carried off the balance sheet as an operating expense.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

proletariat was founded in boston by people out of zynga, and seth sivak had described the goal as h1z1 with fantasy and roguelike ideas underneath it. the shooting was modeled on quake and unreal tournament rather than on anything modern. the look came from somewhere else entirely. akira and princess mononoke were named on the film side, and avatar: the last airbender on the television side.

the initial pitch had been closer to swords than to sorcery and the balance moved over development until the swords were gone. what shipped was a shooter where the projectile had weight and travel time and could be combined with somebody else's projectile, which nothing else in the genre was doing at that price. the game was free and it was cross-platform on day one, which in 2020 was still unusual enough to be a headline.

~ the postmortem ~

blizzard announced the purchase of proletariat on 29 june 2022 and the shutdown notice went out the same week. the studio was not closed and nobody was laid off. the entire team moved to world of warcraft, which was in the middle of a long staffing problem, and the reason for the deal was written openly into the press release. proletariat kept the servers running for another six months and then turned them off on 10 january 2023.

in december 2022, a month before the shutdown, the studio released a community version of the client that let players stand up their own servers. this was done on the way out the door and with no support attached to it. it is the reason the grave is a strange one, because the corpse got up.

~ the long tail ~

by september 2024 spellbreak was running on player-hosted servers with a new build and a visible spike in concurrent numbers, and gaming press that had written the obituary in january 2023 was writing corrections. rock paper shotgun's headline was that its writer had completely missed the game coming back from the dead.

the official product is gone in every sense that matters commercially. there is no store, no publisher, no roadmap and no revenue. what survives is a client and a group of people willing to pay for hosting, which is the same arrangement that keeps thirty-year-old shooters online. a game only really dies when the last person who wanted to run it stops.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »