Ready At Dawn, probably best known for the PlayStation 4 shooter The Order: 1886, have announced the end of sale and support for another of their original titles, Deformers. Despite being utterly adorable, the 2017 multiplayer arena brawler failed to take off with players on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Steam. In a May 11th update to the game’s official site, the studio stated that Deformers was “no longer financially viable”, announced the end of sale on digital platforms, and confirmed that online multiplayer would end on August 9th, 2018. The full announcement follows:
After much deliberation, Ready At Dawn has made the difficult decision to shut down Deformers servers in its Western and European markets on August 9th, 2018. All development on the Western/European version of Deformers will cease effective immediately, and as part of this transition, all physical and digital purchases of Deformers and real-money Strand Pack purchasing will be disabled.
Beginning today, all Workshop items will be available for free so that everyone has the chance to unlock all Forms and Styles for continued use in offline play. We will also be automatically unlocking all Forms and Styles for all accounts prior to the server shutdown.
To our Deformers Community,
Thank you for supporting us in pursuing our passion project. It isn’t often that a team gets that opportunity, and in the process also has the fortune to meet such wonderful and passionate players to join us on our journey. You’ve shared in our challenges and encouraged us along the way with your inspiring messages, artwork,and wonderful videos. We couldn’t have come this far without you. As painful as it was, we had to make a very difficult, but necessary, decision when it became clear that Deformers was no longer financially viable in the West and in Europe. This decision will allow us to keep providing the best play experience as possible for our other games and also enable us to continue to bring you new and exciting games in the future.We thank you again for your continued support, and we encourage everyone to play and have fun with the game in the time remaining.
Thank You,
The Deformers Team
The game and its contentious real-money “Strand Packs” have already been removed from sale on Xbox but as of May 13th they remain available to buy on Steam, and on PlayStation 4 in Europe and North America. The game is also available on physical media and as of this writing Amazon is still offering a download code for the Xbox One version.
Local, offline multiplayer will be all that remains in the game after August 9th, although reviews paint it as an extremely limited mode with non-existent A.I. bots. Deformers has been added to the Watch List calendar and I’ll have a page up on the site for it soon.
Thanks to GamerFirebird90 for submitting this information to the site.