City builder Towns was one of the first games to go through the Steam Greenlight process, and one of the first examples of how early access programmes don’t always work out - since launching in 2012 the game has been plagued with issues, most of which have remained unfixed. Now, two years since release and with the game still not in a completed state, developer Florian Frankenberger has announced on the official forums that he is leaving the project.
”I hope you are not too disappointed,” writes Frankenberger. ”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 …”
The developer cited monetary issues as the reason for his departure, saying that due to declining sales he could not afford to continue working on Towns. ”After getting used to the source code and publishing the first new version of the game, we talked about the agreed payment and it turns out that the sells are getting down rapidly. So we are now selling less than a third of the x copies a month, loosing about 33% of sells per month. To be completely honest, 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 also settled for the 15% of the minimum of x copies which is already well below my normal sallary.”
Dissatisfied owners of Towns (most of them by the sound of it) may not be entirely thrilled to learn that Frankenberger and his fellow developer Xavi Canal are already thinking about a possible sequel. ”Xavi and I were talking about a possible Towns2. At the moment this is just in an idea stage and we can’t really say if he, I or eventually Ben have the time to create a Towns2. As faithful fans of Towns we would of course reward you in some way, when/if the new game is released.”
This revelation didn’t go down particularly well with the community, as you might imagine. An unpleasant reminder that just because a game sounds cool, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the dev team are capable of producing it.
