Publisher Message
2023-08-29Publisher Message:- Although Loneminded/LONE Publishing had no direct involvement in the active development process of this title, we did choose to assist in publishing and managing the third-party title based on its potential and the developers being a small local group with a steady plan. We knew from launch that the developers had a lot of work to do on the title throughout Early Access having successfully put two of our own smaller scoped self-developed/published titles through Early Access to Full Release in 2017 and 2019, but the plan presented to us for Bleak Winter seemed feasible and we were prepared for an 18-24 month Early Access period supporting the developers in creating a solid survival title, with additional support post-release. Development Update
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With the above in mind, over the past couple of days, we have been advised by the developers that due to a private change in circumstances, this title is now a larger piece of work than can be accommodated for, and they are no longer able to guarantee a finished product reflective of the original plan. We presented the developers a number of viable options to bring down the scope of the title to something more realistic to suit, but unfortunately no agreement could be reached. We are naturally incredibly disappointed at this news, not only because we have invested a significant amount of our very limited resources into publishing and managing this project but also because we wanted to see this project flourish and be a success story for a fellow indie developer, however with the above in mind and the potential effect on players, we are not happy to proceed with our involvement in the title if there is no guarantee of a high-quality final product and little to no further development from this point onwards. It is for this reason, with agreement from the developers, that we have stepped in to ask that Valve remove the title from sale on Steam and urge players to seek refunds in line with the Steam refund policy. Thankfully at the time of writing, there have been 16 (net) copies sold since launch so this is not a widespread issue. The title should be removed from sale over the next 24 hours. Separately from that, we can only profusely apologize for our part in bringing this title to market. This was our first "third-party" title that we opted to publish and we did our absolute best to support development as much as possible, this is not the expectation we had when agreeing to publish the project. This has clearly not been the greatest introduction to publishing for us, however this has presented us with some lessons that we can learn from going forward, should we ever look to publish any other "third-party" titles in the future. Please note: if you have purchased the title and wish to refund, please do request a refund via Steam directly as development will be discontinued upon removal from sale.
