The sandbox game Medieval Engineers has left Early Access on Steam. The special thing is that the developer hasn’t released an update for a year and is now publishing it to die.
This is the situation with Medieval Engineers: The sandbox launched in Early Access on Steam in February 2015. Since then, it never quite caught on and had a peak of under 4000 players at release, according to Steamcharts. In the last 30 days, it has had fewer than 100 concurrent players on average.
The Czech developer Keen Software House hasn’t put out an update for a year and is now taking an unusual approach: they are officially releasing Medieval Engineers and offering it for $9.99.
Fans warn: Don’t buy this game
Why the departure from Early Access? A game with few players and no updates for a year doesn’t just suddenly get released.
The developers explain the move by stating that they are restructuring their team and trying to safely release their previous game, Space Engineers, from Early Access. Additionally, they want to focus more on the console port there. They now want to allocate all resources to the support of Space Engineers.
What will happen next with Medieval Engineers? The sandbox will receive an update that, according to the developers, will “fix some critical gameplay bugs” and “stabilize the game and bring it to a more playable state.” They at least write this in a blog post on Steam.
After that, the game will more or less be sent to its death. There will be no further updates or support. However, the real fans can continue to play it.
How are the players reacting? The reactions from fans are quite negative. On Steam, Medieval Engineers has received “extremely negative” reviews in the last 30 days. 167 out of 207 reviews were recently negative.
For example, in the reviews it says: “The game is abandoned, empty, and dead, the developers are a disgrace. Don’t give them any money.” Another user writes: “The game had so much potential, but the developers gave up.”
Some fans, however, still defend Medieval Engineers. bartdbx writes:
I love ME [Medieval Engineers], it is the only game of its kind. The developers have implemented physical laws into gameplay, which can also lead to unwanted but entertaining events. It is the only game where you can be creative in solving various tasks, you can combine items and tools and get appropriate results.
bartdbx on Steam
Other players state that the game would still be fun thanks to active modders. However, the negative reviews prevail. Even bartdbx thinks that the game won’t receive any more updates.
Other MMOs are also doing poorly:
- MMORPG was a hit on Steam, now the servers are closing – What happened?
- Our author Alexander Leitsch suspects: These MMOs will die in 2020
- An action MMO was so bad that it died twice
