- The company have slipped away without a fanfare and barely a blip on the radar
- “With all our sorrow we will shut down the company in about two months”
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After being one of the first promising geolocation pioneers and attracting investment from countrymen Supercell, Shipyard Games has closed.
The company have slipped away without a fanfare and barely a blip on the radar, with only a single, just-discovered Discord post marking their passing, thanking their fans and supporters from over the years.
“We learned a lot”
We have been running out of money and our previous investor didn’t want to continue supporting us.”
In the message dated on May 13th 2024, Andreas Wedenberg, co-founder and CEO of Shipyard Games writes: “In Shipyard Games, we have always looked to develop new and inventive geolocation games, mixing different genres with a geolocation twist as its core. After several very different prototypes, we learned a lot and developed advanced technology that we could use for any geolocation game we wanted.
“The most recent one was Wizards & Kingdoms GO, a very promising game with a fast growing and passionate community. We released an early version around two months ago, knowing it had content for 1-2 weeks, but many of you are still playing and are craving for more content. Recently, we have been more quiet and slowed the release cadence because we’ve been designing how the full game would be for global launch.
“An amazing new geolocation MMO”
“We were very excited to finally fulfil our dream of making an amazing new geolocation MMO in a shared world, and we were quite sure with this design we could achieve it. Unfortunately, the company situation is critical, we have been running out of money and our previous investor didn’t want to continue supporting us despite how promising the game was.
“This means that with all our sorrow we will shut down the company in about two months. The game will not receive more updates and because we can’t keep paying for the servers, the game will eventually be taken offline.
Unfortunately often dreams need money to become true, and we ran out of it.”
“We sincerely appreciate so much all of your help, amazing feedback, bug reports, memes, tutorials, kind words for the team… and we are very sorry we could not finish the game you all deserve, but unfortunately often dreams need money to become true, and we ran out of it.”
The company was one of Supercell’s first investments back in 2017 and it’s clear that the game and Shipyard’s expected output may have taken longer than expected to reach fruition.
The company stayed true to its belief in geo-location gaming as a future trend and an unreleased location-based title entitled Go City, while discussed in 2019, failed to materialize.
