On October 18th, the team at Splash Damage published a news post detailing the future of their long-in-development, free-to-play, mulitplayer shooter Dirty Bomb. “It’s with a heavy heart that, after a bug fix build ships in the upcoming weeks, we will be ending live development and updates on Dirty Bomb,” the post opens.
After a short explanation which you can read in full at the end of this post, the team admits “the bottom line is that we can’t financially justify continuing to work on the game we love.” With no more feature updates planned you’d think the team would be announcing a deadline date but it seems to be left up to the fans. “We know many of you love DB and still play it religiously, so we will keep servers up for you to enjoy, as long as there are a meaningful number of players using them in the supported regions.”
Fans no doubt appreciate the decision but what exactly a “meaningful number of players” looks like is still up in the air. Since 2015 the game has averaged several thousand weekly players but through 2018 those numbers have dropped to a few hundred on any given day. I wouldn’t be surprised if the game held out through the rest of the year but headed for the sunset by the Spring of 2019.
In response, the team has detailed a number of changes to the game in a handy FAQ, also found below this post. In closing they added, “we’d like to say a heartfelt and sincere thank you for your support these many years. Dirty Bomb is a shooter that we always wanted to make, we could not have done it without you and are forever grateful. The future is bright at Splash Damage, we have many announced and unannounced titles in production that we can’t wait to work with you on!”.
I’ll add a tentative date to the Watch List calendar for the end of March 2019 and get a page ready for the site soon. Click through to read the team’s full statement and FAQ and visit DirtyBomb.com for more on the game and its community.
Hey guys,
We’re sorry for the recent radio silence. You deserve better and we haven’t been there for you. It has been a challenging couple of months full of sensitive decisions that we had to make regarding the future of Dirty Bomb. It’s with a heavy heart that, after a bug fix build ships in the upcoming weeks, we will be ending live development and updates on Dirty Bomb.
After regaining publishing rights for DB nearly two years ago, we staffed up a load of developers and tried our best to deliver a Dirty Bomb experience that would be feature-rich with tons of new content, while maintaining its great gameplay feel & balance. Unfortunately, despite all the added time and resources, there were some challenges we couldn’t overcome, and we were not able to make DB the success that we hoped it could be. The bottom line is that we can’t financially justify continuing to work on the game we love.
Since we won’t be releasing any additional Mercenaries, we’re going to refund the All Merc Pack DLC to everyone who purchased it by January 31st, 2019 – the money you spent will go back in your Steam wallet and the unlocked Mercs will remain in your account. We know many of you love DB and still play it religiously, so we will keep servers up for you to enjoy, as long as there are a meaningful number of players using them in the supported regions.
We spent the summer months trying to get you guys as many features as possible in order for you to control DB yourselves, without our direct involvement. We hope that Steam Trading, Community Servers, and FACEIT help you play DB the way you want moving forward.
To close, we’d like to say a heartfelt and sincere thank you for your support these many years. Dirty Bomb is a shooter that we always wanted to make, we could not have done it without you and are forever grateful. The future is bright at Splash Damage, we have many announced and unannounced titles in production that we can’t wait to work with you on!
Thank you,
Splash Damage
FAQ:
Q: Will you still be hosting Official Servers?
A: Yes, we will still be hosting Official Servers as long as the player count supports it.
Q: Can we still rent our own servers?
A: Yes!
Q: Will you be making any new features, an SDK, Mercs, or maps for Dirty Bomb?
A: No. We will only be supporting the game with smaller scale login events.
Q: Does this mean you will be disabling Easy Anti Cheat (KAMU)?
A: No, EAC will stay in place and continue to be updated.
Q: Will you still be responding to Customer Service tickets?
A: Yes. Reports and tickets will still be handled by our Customer Service team.
Q: Will you be making any changes to the store?
A: No, we don’t plan on making any changes to the store right now.
Q: Will you still be running events?
A: We will be running simple events (Weekend Login Bonuses/Extra Cases etc) but nothing on the scale of Nuclear Winter or Jackal’s Eve.
Q: Will there still be Free Merc Rotations?
A: Yes!
Q: What will happen to the Dirty Bomb social channels? (Discord, Reddit, Facebook etc)
A: All of the Dirty Bomb social channels will remain online, and the Dirty Bomb Discord will remain official for the time being.