Fae Farm, the cozy co-op farming sim released in 2023 by Phoenix Labs, is going offline. A message posted to the game's Steam page says the game will remain playable offline in singleplayer mode, but "will no longer be playable online and will not receive any future updates." It also appears that developer Phoenix Labs, which laid off "the majority of the studio" in January, is now fully closed and gone for good.
Phoenix Labs said when those layoffs were made that it would provide updates on the future of Fae Farm, and its debut game Dauntless, "in the coming weeks." The studio announced a month later that Dauntless, a Monster Hunter-style game that ultimately fell prey to the actual Monster Hunter, would be closed entirely in May, but there was no further word on Fae Farm until now. Fae Farm has also been removed entirely from the Epic Games Store, although according to a message posted on Reddit, that apparently happened at least a few weeks ago.
A reason for the end of online support on Steam wasn't provided, but as noted by Delisted Games, Fae Farm requires a Phoenix Labs account for online play, and that's very likely where the problem lies: It's a safe assumption those will be going away very soon, because it now appears that Phoenix Labs itself has now gone away as well.
We said that the Phoenix Labs layoffs in January sounded "like a studio closure in everything but name," and while there's been no official word, the website at phxlabs.ca now leads to a "site not found" error. In an example of the Internet Archive's usefulness, which we discussed yesterday in regards to Reddit's decision to block the site's crawler, its Wayback Machine indicates that the Phoenix Labs website was up as recently as August 2.
It's not a complete catastrophe for fans: There's no indication on other store pages that the console versions of Fae Farm are going to lose online functionality, so players on those platforms seem safe at least for now, and the game will at least remain playable on Steam. Diminished, yes—online co-op was one of Fae Farm's big attractions—but at least still around. People who own the game on the Epic store might not share that feeling, understandably: It's possible the game will appear at some point in the future (Delisted Games speculated that it's being updated to remove the external login requirement) but the fact that it's already been gone for this long leaves me doubtful.
While it appears that Phoenix Labs is now fully shuttered, I've reached out to it and purported corporate owner Forte for comment and will update if I receive a reply.
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