Devs abandon Steam Greenlight title Towns

Towns, which was Greenlit on Steam over a year and a half ago, has been cut adrift by its developers.

It was one of the first titles to pass through the Greenlight system and would in today’s day and age likely be an Early Access title on Steam’s service. At the time it was criticised for launching without making it apparent that development was ongoing.

When I signed up for working on Towns I was told that we sell a minimum of about x copies/month of the game,” developer Florian Frankenberger said. I agreed to work on Towns for 15 per cent of what would remain after removing all the taxes and the Steam fee.

Sales are going down rapidly. So we are now selling less than a third of the x copies a month, losing about 33 per cent of sales per month. I can’t work for that little amount. I have to pay for the rent and food and this doesn’t really suffice for any of it.

I hope you are not too disappointed. And if you are: I’m really sorry. I’m quite new to indie game dev and I couldn’t really see that the game sales were declining that rapidly. I guess if I had more experience I would have seen it coming …

Frakenberger goes on to say that both he and original co-creator Xavi Canal are considering development of a sequel.

In February Canal quit the game, saying: I’m burned, really burned about the game and all it involves. I don’t have the strength to continue with it.

Adding more features won’t change the game to a ‘finished’ status, this is a never-ending story. So, I had to stop at some point and consider it finished, and I did that.”