The Repopulation Is Shutting Down Tomorrow As Third-Party Developer Calls It Quits
Kickstarted sandbox MMORPG The Repopulation is shutting down after lingering in early access for over eight years. The announcement comes from TGS Tech, a third-party contractor that current ownder Idea Fabrik pawned the game off to with the task of both resolving the various issues that riddled it and maintain live service operations.
TGS revealed that they had a falling-out with Idea Fabrik and that they’ll be shutting down the game’s servers, website, and Discord tomorrow, January 13th.
“Despite everyone’s valiant efforts, from developers to testers, TGS has concluded that we cannot make The Repopulation viable despite our best efforts,” said the third-party studio. “At the end of 2021, we intended to make several updates hoping to fix the problems we have all encountered. Although we planned on rebuilding the game on the updated platform, we were not able to come to terms with IF on various business issues.”
“We are extremely disappointed that we were unable to resolve the problems with The Repopulation,” TGS added. “We worked very hard for many years on this game and we were and are invested in its success. We sincerely wish that we could have resolved these issues. We hope you will understand that we did all we could to make this game viable despite the many obstacles we encountered. We also understand that best efforts do not soften the blow of this disappointing news. Thank you all for taking this journey with us.”
Idea Fabrik has yet to inform the community of their plans for the game but TGS says that there’s a possibility that it might be passed on to another developer. As for refunds, TGS maintains that they’re merely a third-party developer and that they have no authority to stop selling the game or issue refunds.
“TGS is not the game’s owner,” the contractor said. “The game’s owner is Idea Fabrik. TGS is only a contractor. TGS does not have the authority or ability to suspend sales or provide refunds. Only Idea Frabik [sic] can do these things. Idea Fabrik is aware of the issues but we have not been told what they intend to do.”
TGS has also turned over all The Repopulation social media accounts over to Idea Fabrik, noting that all future inquiries will now be handled by the latter.
Frankly, the news doesn’t come as surprise since both TGS and Idea Fabrik were ominously silent for the better part of two years despite the latter’s insistence that everything was fine and that there was “no need for alarm.”
This isn’t the first time that The Repopulation has been involved in development drama either. The game was Kickstarted by the game’s original developer, Above & Beyond, back in 2012 for nearly $230,000 as a Star Wars Galaxies-inspired title.
Shortly after The Repopulation’s early access alpha launch in 2014, Above & Beyond got into a nasty contract dispute with Idea Fabrik, the creator of the game’s Hero Engine, which resulted in severe development slowdowns, game outages, and the hasty development of a spin-off called Fragmented which ultimately failed. In a bizarre turn of events, Idea Fabrik ended up acquiring The Repopulation in 2017 to continue its development with plans to rebuild core parts of the game from scratch. Development, however, never moved past early access alpha and now it looks like it won’t be doing so in the near future, if it does go back online at all.
