Failbetter Games has had their Early Access game Sunless Skies delayed for now, due to a variety of financial difficulties with the company that has resulted in four layoffs for the already small studio.
Failbetter Games, the developer of games like Sunless Sea and the browser game Fallen London, have declared Sunless Skies delayed while they navigate various financial difficulties. The announcement came on the game’s Kickstarter page, and announced that they were also laying off staff. What this means for the game is still a mystery.
The Fallen London universe is a cosmic horror story where the city of London in England is taken deep underground by a number of eldritch cosmic entities known as the Echo Bazaar. Failbetter Games’s various games allow you to explore the strange and often frightening new world, which includes things as innocuous as sapient rats that you have a war with in your apartment, to things like the Dawn Machine, a mysterious light-producing machine that wants to take over the world.
Sunless Skies was supposed to be a semi-sequel to Fallen London and Sunless Sea. An event called the Liberation of Night has taken place, and now the stars are going out one by one. Players must take to the skies and explore the High Wilderness, while going on a number of both strange and very frightening adventures.
However, if Failbetter Games goes under because of its financial difficulties and they keep Sunless Skies delayed until further notice, we might not get the game at all, at least unless something happens that gets the studio financially solvent again.
While Failbetter Games has said that they should have a revised release date for Sunless Skies before the end of February, there’s still the matter of the game actually selling well. While Sunless Sea was an indie darling of cosmic horror and creepy sea (or in the parlance of the games, “Zee”) voyages, Sunless Skies hasn’t had the same sort of success. The game has sold 15 percent less copies due to many people buying it in Early Access, along with the Early Access market changing drastically from 2014, when Sunless Sea came out.
Hopefully even Failbetter Games has announced Sunless Skies delayed, it doesn’t mean that this is the last game Failbetter will ever come out with. You can help the studio out by buying a copy of the game on Steam now.
