The Stomping Lands Taken Off Steam, Developers Stone Silent

There’s nothing quite as sad as a high-profile indie game going belly up, especially when it’s one of those outrageously successful Kickstarter games that gets everyone hyped up from here to the moon. 

I’m fairly certain I’ve never talked about it, but if you have a interest in PC gaming then it’s better than likely that you’ve heard of the game The Stomping Lands—an ambitious take of the survival MMO like Rust or Day Z, except instead of fighting zombies in a post-civilization hellhole, you’re hunting, killing, and capturing dinosaurs in a pre-civilization hellhole.  It raised $114,000 during it’s kickstarter campaign (when all it asked for was $20,000) and the developer estimated it would be ready for early access come may.  There was a lot of hype around it due to its trailers and ambitious promises, and as promised, it was delivered at May—a crude but functional dinosaur-themed prehistoric survival game.

But then there were problems. After the last major update in June, things went quiet from the development end.  No new updates, no new patches or content, nothing.  Radio silence.  Fans protested, demanding answers or expiations, but none were offered—to the point where the team’s PR person quit, citing a lack of internal communication and “not wanting to string the community along”.

And just today, things went from bad to worse: while The Stomping Land’s steam page is still up, it’s no longer being sold.  You can no longer purchase the game, and worse still, nobody seems to know why.  Did the developers cancel development?  Is Steam taking action regarding the silence?   There’s no way to know, not at the moment.  But this will surely come as a disappointment to both fans and people who were interested in how the game was evolving, like myself.

I’ll be sure to keep you posted if the story develops. But if it’sa anything like the game, that seems unlikely.

Boom!