When we learned that TitanReach got fully funded by one person after it announced plans to suspend development, Square Root Studios co-founder Unravel noted that development of the MMO would be scaling up, moving from an eight-person team to 23, with industry-appropriate pay scales and titles to match as it planned its return. Before that return, however, apparently the game will go dark.
The studio announced on the game’s Discord this weekend that TitanReach’s servers will be shut off, the client download link will be revoked, and that the game will go into “private development.” This shutdown will also likely mean the game’s website will be unavailable or with limited functionality as the infrastructure is reworked. Additionally, followers of the game should expect things to be “a little quiet over the next couple of months whilst [the devs] scale up and plan the future of TitanReach.” That will seemingly include players who purchased the game specifically to participate in the early access that began this year.
The next time the game will be playable, it will be in some manner of alpha or beta state, but it would appear that the game — and most of its comms — will be going dark, assuming this announcement is to be believed; readers will recall that in that same interview linked above, Unravel mentioned that future dev blogs will continue and that the scope and features of TitanReach will not be changed.
Readers will recall that we’ve been covering TitanReach since 2020, when it launched a $430,000 US Kickstarter that failed to fund, then announced plans for Indiegogo; when we used it as an example of crowdfund misuse, the studio insisted that its Indiegogo wouldn’t use flexible funding. But that campaign never materialized, and the studio announced the game needed funding or it “was all over.” Then the team released a flexible-funding credit storefront anyway, followed by a stealth-retracted statement about working conditions and pay. In spring 2021, the game hit paid early access, though it went F2P this past summer. Just a few weeks after releasing an ambitious roadmap and plans to launch in 2022, the team admitted that it was out of cash and development had been halted, then it announced that an angel investor had given it a ton of money, no strings attached, to finish the game.
