Pantropy and its developer shutting down, Early Access title off Steam [UPDATE]

[UPDATED 02/02/22] Shortly after this post went up the game was removed from Steam. The usual “at the request of the publisher” notice appears on its Steam Store page now. Our original post from this morning follows.

Pantropy launched in Early Access on Steam in January of 2019 after a small but successful Kickstarter campaign the year before. Updates on the game’s progress appeared intermittently but as early as 2019 there were reportedly announcements on the game’s Discord server about trouble funding the project. The team then posted the following announcement to Steam just a few days ago, on January 31st.

Today we come to you with a rather sad but unfortunately inevitable message. The company behind our game is out of money and we cannot afford to upkeep the running costs. Sales have been miserable across the last 2 years and Pantropy was making low 3-digit numbers per month, which is not enough to pay any of the running costs.

We have been at this point before and decided to put more of our own money into the company and try to save the game but that didn´t go well and we ended up burning even more money. We want to thank everyone who believed in us during this time and gave us support and say sorry that things didn´t go to plan. We really wanted this to be a good game.

Ultimately, we have decided to remove Pantropy from Steam. We don´t want new buyers to be frustrated by a game that will not be developed any further. Also our company will shut down and will be liquidated.

Thanks for reading this! Stay safe!

The Pantropy team

In a follow-up reply developer account TheCreator added that owners would be able to continue playing in single-player mode or run private servers to continue playing in multi-player modes. They also responded to criticisms about the game’s languorous pace of updates. Despite claims that it would be removed from sale immediately, as of this writing Pantropy is available on Steam for $1.99 and is on sale until February 11th. Thanks to Dimchkin for pointing out the news, I’ve added the 11th to the Watch List calendar and will have a page up on the site later.