Spilt Milk Studios Will Be Shutting Down Lazarus After Three Years In Open Alpha
Another game running on Improbable’s SpatialOS platform will officially be shutting its doors. Indie developer Spilt Milk Studios has announced via press release that they have ceased development on their ambitious sci-fi MMORPG Lazarus. The game has been in Open Alpha for nearly 3 years but the studio its that there are just some challenges that they can’t overcome.
“We spent months and years with a tiny team, exploring the challenges and opportunities of a new design space - persistence, scale, the kinds of things that the cloud can offer - and in the process providing to help our technology partner Improbable improve their tech as well as making Lazarus brilliant fun. and we’re immensely proud of what we achieved. But after a long period of Open Alpha, we’ve made one of the toughest decisions of our careers: we are not going to release Lazarus.”
“Lazarus is a brilliant game and the people who play it with us are amazing, but it did not reach a point during its alpha that would give us the confidence that it would launch successfully,” says the studio. “Put simply, if we were to launch Lazarus, the cost of maintaining and expanding the game as we marketed it to more players and worked on our monetisation would put a dangerous financial strain on an independent games studio like ours. We love both Lazarus and the community that has grown around it, but we can't take that risk.”
Lazarus is the third SpatialOS game that has shut down this year with battle royale game Mavericks: Proving Grounds and sandbox MMORPG Worlds Adrift pulling the plug just a few weeks ago. The servers will remain online until 5am PDT on September 12th.
Head over to the Lazarus official site for more details.