Last weekend we recounted some of 2022’s largest MMO crowdfunding stories, and unsurprisingly one of the biggies was the saga of TitanReach, which ceased development for a second time this past February and saw its angel benefactor pull his funding from the game after its lead dev was found misappropriating the funds.
We bring this whole thing back up again because a couple of our readers pointed out another few pages in this stupid saga. The game – or a game with a very similar name and literally the same logo – resurfaced with a trailer on YouTube that heralded a 2024 launch window and an upcoming Kickstarter drive.
This new Titan Reach comes by way of Archage Studios, a self-described small indie studio from California that claims on the launch trailer’s blurb that it acquired the original TitanReach and decided to “take it in a different direction and bring to life a whole new story and adventure for players.” The studio’s official website is a mad swirl of fortune cookie-style Confucianism, vaguely worded promises of the game’s feature set, and links to a members list that appears to be just two people and single-person community “groups” that talk about steroid use and female libido among other things.
The game’s official Discord offers more vague answers: One response to a player question claims that the devs of the studio have nothing to hide while there appear to be only two developers in the community, and another post says that the game’s name isn’t an indication of any “nefarious agenda.”
The Discord, YouTube blurbs, and Twitter account all point out that this Titan Reach has nothing to do with the original TitanReach, claiming in a November tweet that it was “taken over” from Square Root Studios and that Archage’s version is completely original. However, reporting from YouTuber Callum Upton rebuts this claim.
Upton shares interviews he held with both the game’s original lead dev Unravel and the head of Archage Studios: The Archage team claims it reached out to Unravel about taking over the project, suddenly found Unravel’s email was invalid, then got a response later that gave Archage carte blanche to “do with the name what they want.”
A statement from Unravel notes that he was invited to the Archage devs’ Discord, saw an underwhelming demonstration of the game using Unreal assets and no gameplay loop, and supposedly told the devs to not use the TitanReach name, after which he was thrown out of the Discord.
However, Archage’s version of events is completely different, claiming that Unravel was making “insane stories” about an unnamed business partner who wanted the name back, which prompted Archage to boot Unravel from the Discord.
Upton’s digging further exposed, among other things, that a supposed picture of the studio is actually just a stock image; that the studio has made one other game, End of Days, which was called a gameplay-less UE4 Marketplace asset hellhole that was delisted from Steam; and that Archage is planning to sell ArchCoin and is selling the game for $40 on its launcher before it’s even been released or even built. That launcher, by the way, was initially anounced as in-development in November but there has been literally no news out of the studio since at the time of this writing.
