Hi, everyone - this post has some major updates regarding Starlight Re:Volver, Pahdo Labs’s future priorities as a studio, and what this means to our players.
Our Current Situation is Difficult
To begin with some context to be as honest as possible to our community, Starlight Re:Volver did not sell well enough to sustain our studio operations.
We had a lackluster launch despite a strong number of wishlists and a strong community of early playtesters. We acknowledge a large part of this was due to the quality of the game itself; we had ambitious goals of making a bustling social hub with a robust roguelite gameplay system, but we spread ourselves too thin. Our sales numbers are a reflection that the game wasn’t fun enough to sustain a consistent, healthy player base.
Consequently, we recently had to cut half of our development team, shift the entire team to working remotely, and had numerous discussions on how to best move forward with the game and what could realistically save our studio from shutting down.
That brings us to the present day: we concluded that incremental, monthly changes to Starlight Re:Volver wouldn’t move the needle enough for us to “save” this game or our studio. Maintaining Starlight Re:Volver as we have done is not a viable path forward, business-wise for our studio, and we need to go back to the drawing board to ultimately make something our community will enjoy.
We understand we disappointed many Divers throughout this process and cannot overstate how much we appreciate everyone who played the game regardless of the outcome. If the opportunity comes, we promise to return the generosity in the future by rewarding our existing players (sorry…we need to be vague on the details but for those who bought the game, we promise it won’t be for nothing if we survive).
Starlight Re:Volver will still be available to play
Starlight Re:Volver will still be available to all users who purchased the game and will continue to be available for purchase. However, the game will no longer receive updates and will transition to be an offline game.
Our online servers take a significant amount of money and resources to maintain on top of regular updates, and we cannot sustainably keep up this cadence with our team size with the returns we are getting.
While the game will still be playable, the following changes will take effect:
Starlight Re:Volver will no longer be hosted on online servers and will be offline (solo) by early December
All players who purchase or purchased Starlight Re:Volver automatically unlock all dekos (cosmetics) ever made by default
We will continue to fix major bugs and make technical and infrastructure improvements on occasion
We do not plan on offering Japanese, Chinese, etc. localization unless we see greater player counts from those regions
What to Expect Next
As mentioned above, we’ll be keeping our heads down with prioritizing our plans for next steps and will share more when we feel we are ready to do so. The next time you hear any major updates from us will probably be around February. We understand that this is a disappointment to our existing community, but we hope to eventually regain the love and trust we’ve received in the future.
Thank you, Divers.
-Pahdo Labs