Anticipated anime action RPG halts updates just 3 months after launch because of poor sales: 'The game wasn’t fun enough to sustain a consistent, healthy player base'

It's a videogame story that's all too common these days. "Despite a strong number of wishlists and a strong community of early playtesters," the roguelite action RPG Starlight Re:Volver failed to catch fire after its release in August, and developer Pahto Labs has laid off half its team and says the game will receive no further updates.

It's an unfortunate outcome for a game we had high hopes for in the months heading up to release. "With a delightfully colourful cast rooted in old-school magical girl vibes," PC Gamer's Mollie Taylor wrote in September 2024, "it's a welcome change from the usual dark and gritty aesthetic that's so prevalent among the genre." It was also among the 10 most-played demos in the June 2025 Steam Next Fest.

But the final result didn't live up to that early promise: In a message posted to Steam, Pahto Labs said Starlight Re:Volver's failure was largely due to the underwhelming quality of the game. "We had ambitious goals of making a bustling social hub with a robust roguelite gameplay system, but we spread ourselves too thin," the studio wrote. "Our sales numbers are a reflection that the game wasn’t fun enough to sustain a consistent, healthy player base."

Despite laying off half the development team and moving to full remote operation, it was eventually—probably inevitably—decided that incremental updates to Starlight Re:Volver wasn't going to turn things around. The only option is "to go back to the drawing board to ultimately make something our community will enjoy."

An update on Starlight Re:Volver and Pahdo Labs.

— @starlightrevolver.bsky.social (@starlightrevolver.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2025-11-20T21:58:07.862Z

What exactly that will be is yet to be determined, but Pahto said there probably won't be any more "major updates" from the studio until February 2026. As for Starlight Re:Volver, it will remain available to play, and everyone who owns or purchased the game will have all cosmetics automatically unlock, but the servers are being taken down and the game will be offline only by early December. Bug fixes and technical improvements will be made "on occasion," but there will be no Chinese or Japanese localization "unless we see greater player counts from those regions."