Development on Them's Fightin' Herds has been officially abandoned

[kane_magus]

The promised Story Mode, i.e. the only thing I cared even a little bit about ever getting for this fucking game (which I backed on KickstarterIndiegogo years ago), has been scrapped.

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The Future of TFH

As we look forward to the release of Nidra and Baihe, let's talk about what comes next.
After the Season 1 Pass is complete, we will be ceasing active development on TFH. We will still be able to release small patches to address game-breaking bugs, but no new content will be produced. Unfortunately, that includes Story Mode.

Story Mode has always been an ambitious feature and one we truly desired to implement. We know how much our fans have been looking forward to Story Mode chapters, and we hope you understand how much we looked forward to working on and releasing them.

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Oh well, yet another bullet point to add to my growing list of reasons for why I am beyond done with crowd-funded, unfinished horseshit.

Also, I just went to the Modus Games (EDIT) apparently renamed to "Maximum Entertainment" now? (/EDIT) publisher page on Steam and set it to be Ignored, and the few other games of theirs that I had Wishlisted have now been removed from there.

Comments

[goldpseudo]

Yeah, this is why I pretty much refuse to kickstart video games at all. Even with the best of intentions, gamedev is fraught with difficulties and crowdsourced stuff especially tends to promise the world while underestimating the costs and can rarely deliver.

Even non-crowdsourced triple-AAA stuff with real budgets and full development teams fail to meet expectations and drop promised features all the time.

Same reason I rarely if ever buy into early access games, or anything that's supposed to come out in installments over the next [insert arbitrary time period]. Give me a complete playable game up front, and then we can talk about whether I think it's worth the purchase. Otherwise, I can wait for the inevitable sale on the complete collection re-release when it's actually done.

Doesn't help that so many people treat kickstarter et al as a pre-order site rather than a risky investment platform, and expect/demand stuff to be delivered in full well before it's ever ready.

[kane_magus]

Looking into this particular case a bit more, I think this might have been more of a "got bought by a bigger company and then got fucked over by said bigger company" thing than it was a "mismanaging crowd-funding money" thing, though there's likely plenty of the latter as well. After all, Mane6 possibly wouldn't have needed to sell out to Modus if they'd done a better job with their Indiegogo money. I'm not sure if the fact that they split out a lot of the content into paid DLC and a "season pass" is more indicative of "oh crap we ran out of money and need more funds to finish this" or of "our new Modus overlords made us do this," though. Probably a bit of both.

And yeah, speaking more generally, I haven't pledged to a crowd-sourced project or bought an early access game in years now. I don't foresee ever doing so again, and shit like this is why. Of course, "got bought by a bigger company and then got fucked over by said bigger company" is a phenomenon that long predates crowd-sourcing and early access.

As for episodic stuff, I don't buy those until all the episodes are complete and released, assuming it's a game I'm actually interested in at all. Hell, I don't even play free episodic games until and unless they're finished, e.g. The Silver Lining, which still to this day has not yet released its final episode and almost assuredly never will at this point. As such, I will likely never play it. (Their last/most recent update on the status of the game will be half a decade old as of January 2024.)

[owsf2000]

Looks like their little announcement had similar responses to the entire crowd of fans. It's currently at "Mostly Negative" in reviews. Pretty much all the negatives are referring to the abandonment of the game.

I bought the game a bit back since I saw it on a big enough sale since it was flagged as Verified for the Steamdeck, although apparently you need to set up your own template to get it to run in handheld mode. I think it'll work fine when docked with a keyboard. Not sure about controller use. Either way I've been too apathetic to really figure it out. Certainly won't be touching any of the DLC for the game either way. If they can't be bothered to finish the base game, I ain't buying what they deemed to be Extra.

[kane_magus]

The only money I ever put into this game was the $15 I paid on Indiegogo in 2015, and I'm glad now that's all it was. I'm like you in that I'm damn well not going to buy DLC for a game that isn't even finished yet.

All I ever played of this game was the one chapter of Story Mode that they managed to release, because I had zero interest in playing online against other people. What there was of the Story Mode was pretty good and if it was indicative of what could have come later, if they'd actually bothered to finish it, the game could have been pretty amazing. As it stands now, though, the game is little more than an unfinished turd puddle.

(Some people on the Indiegogo are asking for refunds. Yeah, good luck with that. *eye roll* I'm not going to ask them to give me my $15 back, but they can expect me to never give them even 15¢ for anything they may try to do in the future.)