Pixelmage Games, the indie studio headed up by MMO veteran John Smedley, announced today that it is folding up, which means Hero’s Song is coming to an end.
“It’s with a heavy heart that I have to report that Pixelmage Games is going to be shutting down and we have ceased development on Hero’s Song. For the last year, our team has worked tirelessly to make the game we’ve dreamed about making, and with your support, and the support of our investors, we were able to get the game into Early Access. Unfortunately sales fell short of what we needed to continue development. We knew going in that most startups don’t make it, and as an indie game studio we hoped we would be the exception to that rule, but as it turned out we weren’t.”
Notably, the team says that anyone who purchased the game is entitled to claim a refund — through Steam the old-fashioned way or by email if you’re an Indiegogo contributor.
Hero’s Song was announced just a year ago as a retro-graphics sandbox MMOARPG; though its original Kickstarter was canceled when it appeared it wouldn’t fund, the team was confident in its ability to launch in October based on investment funding. Its Indiegogo campaign this past fall pulled in nearly $100,000.
We had a hint that this was coming earlier in December when rumors that the game was in trouble began to surface. At the time, the studio would neither confirm nor deny the rumors on the record and would publicly say only that “money is tight” and that it was “working through some things.”
