When I was a kid, post-launch support was a concept reserved mainly for NASA, and rarely the domain of video games. Sure, you might download the odd online patch on your 56k modem to fix particularly gnarly bugs. But that was more or less it. These days, it's expected that games will be supported for months and even years after release. And this support isn't limited to fixing bugs: Developers are expected to add new, often free content to their games if they want to keep those Steam reviews in the blue.
I often wonder about the effect this has upon developers, and if the words of Roboquest's designers are anything to go by, it sounds like it's pretty exhausting. A bright and cheerful rogue-lite FPS about blasting robots through randomly generated environments, Roboquest launched into Steam early access in 2020, before formally releasing in 2023. Developer RyseUp Studio has continued to support the game since. Now though, after what the devs say is 10 years of work on the game, that support is coming to an end.
"2025 marks nearly a decade working on Roboquest, and it also marks the end of the journey for the game," write the devs in a Steam blog. "We know many of you would have loved to see more updates, more content, more Roboquest. But that isn't something we are able to deliver."
According to RyseUp, Roboquest was never intended to be a game with the kind of post-launch support it ultimately received. "The initial experience was designed to be a 25/50 hours gameplay experience, there's no way we can continue to provide content for players with over 1000 hours of gameplay," they write. "We tried something with the Endless Update, with some shortcomings, for sure. But the passion that burnt bright for so many years started to falter. Fatigue kicked in, and we realized we really needed to turn the page."
Consequently, RyseUp says there won't be any more updates for Roboquest, and the only remaining releases related to the game are a PlayStation port coming at the end of May, and a standalone spinoff Roboquest VR.
While this represents the end for Roboquest, it isn't the end for RyseUp. The developers are now focussed on a new project. "With the experience we accumulated and all the errors we made along the way, we're aiming for a much, much more efficient development plan." This makes it sound a bit like RyseUp has made a mess of supporting Roboquest. But it's worth noting that the game is well liked on Steam, with an overwhelmingly positive overall rating out of more than 16,000 reviews.
I suppose I find it concerning that developers feel the need to be so apologetic about ending support for a game they've worked on for a decade—one that was never intended to have such support in the first instance, for that matter. It speaks to how warped expectations have become regarding what developers should provide. If you're a colossal publisher making a shooter that costs $70, and you've already promised it will run for a decade, that's one thing. But if we're talking about a smaller dev charging a fraction of that price, I honestly don't expect them to try to run on the same hamster wheel until they collapse from exhaustion.
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