Things have been worryingly quiet over at developer One More Game and its self-described “real-time battler” Spellcraft. The multiplayer tactical title was first unveiled by the studio back in April 2022, promising “a fast-action, competitive game that requires both strategic thinking and quick decision-making to achieve victory.”
The game went into alpha this past April and even talked up its plans for its next alpha test and its overall plans, but the studio started to shy away from putting forth more builds after last June, citing how its first preseason “did not meet [its] expectations for a long-lived and healthy competitive game.” From there, OMG had fallen completely silent, and now followers of the project know why, as the studio announced the sunsetting of the game before it even got off of the ground.
The post admits that in the studio’s desire to keep Spellcraft a secret, it ended up missing the greater point of whether the title would even garner an audience to begin with. “[O]ur warring desires for secrecy and novel game-play led us to make a mistake: we didn’t do enough to validate that our game would find enough players who love it,” the studio contends.
The rest of the post then details how developers created multiple new prototypes to try and make a “financially viable” version of Spellcraft, but after multiple months, OMG has decided to halt development of the multiplayer battler, with servers going dark over the next few weeks and the game’s Discord staying online for an unspecified length of time.
This doesn’t spell the end of One More Game however, as the studio is already working on its next title and resolves to engage with players sooner to ensure that its next idea has an audience. “It’s been difficult for our team to find our path through what has been a significant disappointment, as I’m sure it is to some of you reading this,” the announcement closes. “We appreciate each and every player that helped us build Spellcraft, and we’re sorry we didn’t find a path to complete it.”
One More Game went public back in 2020 as a new studio under founder of ArenaNet and En Masse Entertainment Patrick Wyatt and key Riot Games dev Jamie Winsor; it included multiple other big names in the MMO world, including Guild Wars 2 art director Daniel Dociu, and was buffered by some major investment from the likes of Riot and Twitch.
