Last week, we reported that The Repopulation had suffered a patch delay as a result of contract and financial renegotiation on the part of Hero Engine. While Above & Beyond was reluctant to discuss the matter in depth due to confidentiality agreements, studio co-owner Joshua Halls did say that the team was “blindsided” and was working with Hero Engine to “minimize its impact.”
This weekend, Hero Engine owner Idea Fabrik PLC gave more information on its internal problems. As the company’s chairman explained to its community, it’s about money.
As some of you have learned already, we are facing difficult times at Idea Fabrik PLC. Because of outside 3rd party related issues, we may be facing some down time to all our HeroEngine and HeroCloud services.
Though we are confident that Idea Fabrik is not going out of business and the HeroEngine and HeroCloud services will be restored, the issues we face right now mean a possible black out (or interruption) of all services. This will include all HeroBlade services as well as all web services.
It has been speculated that funding is the primary issue. And this is partially true. Due to forces outside of the company, at this time we are legally and morally bound in what information we are able to give regarding the causes. However I can say that it does not involve any of our middleware partners.
We are working hard to prevent any outages, however, if one does occur, rest assured that we will work twice as hard to get all survives back up and running.
Idea Fabrik PLC is a public company that relies on third party financing. We are currently in negotiations to secure our funding for the present and the future. This however does take time, and sadly, could result in a possible downtime of services. Since we were not given adequate time to make any adjustments, we are working very hard towards this goal.
While I realize this information may seem vague, we sincerely apologize for not being able to say more at this time. Please rest assured that we are doing everything to either prevent this or make it as painless and short as possible.
In response, Josh Halls cautioned Repopulation players that a game service blackout may occur and said that “there is a very real danger of downtime at this point.”
If there is an interruption of service this will impact us as well (as already seen by the new account issue that resulted in suspension of sales). We cannot comment much further on the situation at this time beyond what has been made public.
A&B’s J.C. Smith admitted the studio is in a “holding pattern“:
Best case scenario, we’re just looking at a patch delay for them to get things back up to speed. Other scenarios could involve downtime and legal battles, or Hero Engine being bought by another company. Until we allow the situation to play out on their end, will be hard for us to provide a real update. At this point, similar to the community, we’re in a holding pattern waiting to see what will happen.
Players have speculated that The Repopulation makes use of Hero Engine’s HeroCloud service, which may go offline during the negotiations. As of the time of this writing, however, the servers are still up and the devs are still waiting to push out patch 15.10.1. And there’s probably no reason to panic about the ultimate fate of the game. Smith offered this reassurance:
In the event that the worst case scenario does happen, we still have outs.
