After a boost in interest Skotos won’t be leaving Steam after all [No wait, it is]

[UPDATE 05/03/23] KomodoBit updated once again on April 30th to announce that Skotos would be leaving Steam and this time it really did. The game had the ‘app_retired’ flag added on May 1st. Our original post continues below:

Just this past weekend KomodoBit Games announced that Skotos would be leaving Steam and they were expecting it to disappear in short order. Since that news hit, however, the developer has decided to keep the game around as it’s suddenly seen an increase in players and “a ton of DLC sales”.

Backstory on why skotos was leaving steam: Since May of 2022 Skotos had been free to play on steam, however, the game had very few players and almost no DLC sales from that. So I decided last week that I would be making the game paid for multi-platform price parity and contacted steam support to change it, They told me no. This left one option, I would need to take the game down to have price parity with other platforms the game is launching on.

Now why is the game staying?: After telling steam support I wanted to remove my game from steam, within 12 hours the game had 100s of players and a ton of DLC sales. I made no change to the game or store page so that means steam intentionally decided to push my game and as of right now they are still doing that so it will be staying up and on other platforms it will remain free to play since it does work if shown to real people.

Will it stay on steam forever?: As long as steam does not go back to sending bots to my store page and the game does not go back to 0 players for months on end then it will stay, if that does happen then being on steam will be pointless as they will provide no value to me or the players of my games on the platform.

I want to apologize about the stress that caused for people who are enjoying the game, steam told me to make an announcement about leaving and then as soon as I did they pushed it. I was under the assumption they were going to take it down same day I made the announcement but they did not.

Steam Announcement – March 14, 2023

Some have credited the spike in interest to the number of players who follow delisting news and curators but developer Ullr discounts this in the comments on the new post. The increase began within hours of them announcing the delisting, likely before it had much time to spread off of Steam. Whatever the case, Skotos will be sticking around for a while longer it seems. Thanks to m1n3c7afty in the comments for pointing out the news.