Over the weekend, we added a new entry to our “whatever happened to X” series with a quick note about Fragmented, the survival sandbox that Above & Beyond put together in its attempt to raise enough funds to save The Repopulation. While we quoted the formal statement that A&B wasn’t abandoning updates for the game at launch, an awesome tipster dug up a forum thread from just last week where the devs effectively admit defeat.
“The game hasn’t been abandoned but it is more or less in maintenance and bug fix mode only at this point,” A&B’s J.C. Smith says in response to players asking whether it’s worth $3 from the latest sale. “It just doesn’t bring in enough revenue for anyone to support it full time at this point. Josh are I still around to fix emergency issues and issue the occasional bug patch but the team has moved on to other projects at this point and we don’t foresee any major additions to the game in the future. Future patches will likely be similar to the last couple patches, focusing on streamlining and bug fixes.”
Just one more casualty of The Repopulation’s sad story.
Well said, Bree :(
Somehow…I kinda had a feeling this would all end up like this : /
The game’s title is literally “Fragmented“. It couldn’t have ended any other way.
Hmm. My anger at this point has boileth overth many times as a result of Idea Fabs shenanigans.
Yea, I’m blaming Idea Fab because had they not shutdown their engine and cloud services to A&B to begin with, none of this would have happened.
Meh… some days are better than others.
A little. But some blame goes to them as well. They didn’t read the contract – or have a real lawyer read it and they decided to do this separate game in the midst of making the backer pledged game. Both enormous mistakes. It might be something if they made these mistakes with their own money – but they didn’t.
If I had pledged a bunch of money and found out the doofuses in charge didn’t properly read a contract I’d be more than irate.
Funny thing is Idea Fabrik probably could have stolen Fragmented too. But they were like, “Nah, we’ll pass.”
Yikes.
After this whole debacle, I’ll be avoiding any titles by above and beyond in the future.
In not sure if that’s 100% fair, as they basically got assaulted and left at the side of the road by the assailants afterwards. That can be one big black hole of morale suckage for anyone to recover from.
It’s fair in my opinion. They were in charge of their product, it’s development, who they partnered with, backers money, and how to rectify any issues that arose due to their previous mistakes. They blew it on all counts. How could I trust their business decisions when it comes to future projects?
Fair enough. Notice I said not 100% fair, so yeah, they’ve made bad business decisions. But, at least IMHO, they were not unethical, so I tend to want to give someone another chance/benefit of the doubt, in those kind of situations.
But I can totally understand your perspective on the matter. I just wonder though, if they were not treated so poorly by Idea Fabrik, would they have still failed?
Making Fragmented was one of many awful decisions these guys made. To follow Daybreak’s, possible king of bad developers, lead on segmenting H1Z1 King of the Hill and that other piece of tripe they split off was monumentally stupid.
Sorry guys – this industry is not your bag. I’d stay out or get a regular job crunching code for someone who knows how to get a game out. gl
When you’re desperate, you grab at anything, to stay alive.
Though hindsight being 20/20, they really did make some poor decisions.
As soon as they announced Fragmented it was a head scratcher. I know they were following both Daybreak and CIG’s lead – but both are possibly the worst developers in all of video gaming. Like really…the worst.
I guess the whole Hero Engine debacle left Above & Beyond Technologies fragmented.
I’ll see myself out.
:P
Lol.