 | Digital Release: | Steam January 21, 2016 |
| Delisting: | April 14, 2017 – Removed from Sale June-August 2017 – Server Shutdown |
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| Developer: | Imigea Ltd | |
| Publisher: | Gamevial | |
| Available On: | None Demo still up on Steam |
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| Links: | SteamDB page Raven-Woods (Spin-off/sequel) |
Delisting
Lif was delisted from Steam on April 14th, 2017 when its price was set to $0.00. On April 19th, 2017, publisher Gamevial made a post on the game’s Steam Community forum explaining that Lif would be shut down in the coming months. The post read:
This has been a bad year for us. The web player came to an agonisingly slow halt, and traction for these games on steam failed to meet the gap. We’ve now hit the uncomfortable moment where just keeping things running on the server costs more than we get (actually, we’ve been there a while).
Rather than just shut down when the final penny is gone, we have decided to pull out now, while we can still keep the servers up for a while, and not let folks down. This means that everyone who has bought a license gets another few months before our server stops.
I cannot describe how hard we tried to make this work both before and after publishing. We had to wrestle with angry fans who wanted to keep it free. We had to wrestle with folks that either didn’t get or didn’t like it, and we had to do all this with a budget that inhibited any of the things we secretly wished to build in, like a switch over to a better engine or an overhaul of the AI.
So, in short, we’re no longer selling Lif, we intend on maintaining the servers as long as possible, so for those who’ve bought it, it’ll still run, and of course single player will be unaffected.
Thanks to those that believed,
Gamevial.
According to SteamDB updates, the game appears to have gone offline permanently between June and August of 2017. On May 17th, 2017 Gamevial made a final post to their Facebook page announcing the closure of the publisher. Ultimately, in January of 2018 their Facebook and Twitter accounts were updated to point fans toward Raven-Woods.de where a group of developers began iterating on the open source code from Lif that Gamevial had donated to them.
The game remains accessible in single-player, offline mode and the demo can still be downloaded from Steam as of this writing.
About the Game
“In Lif you play as an animal and can forage, fight, love, and generally scurry about as animals do. Lif, the Animal Multiplayer game, where you can run free as a beast and interact with other animal players and environments.“