Anime action RPG studio Pahdo Labs shuts down despite accruing $17.5M in funding: 'We believed making a demo of a familiar but new game would be our best shot'

Effy, the hammer-wielding hero from Starlight Re:Volver

(Image credit: Pahdo Labs)

In November, just three months after it launched into early access, Starlight Re:Volver halted updates. Despite a demo that did well during Steam Next Fest, the anime action RPG underperformed at launch. Pahdo Labs laid off half its team, halted updates, and said it was going "back to the drawing board", with a follow-up announcement promised for February.

Now that follow-up has arrived, and it's more bad news. CEO Dan Zou has announced the studio is shutting down completely. "Since our last update in November, we've been grappling with the reality that Starlight Re:Volver did not achieve the commercial success we needed to sustain Pahdo Labs. We aimed high, spread ourselves too thin, and shipped a game that couldn't hold a healthy player base."

Zou revealed that Pahdo spent the last few months working on a demo for a game in a similar style called Edge of Divinity, hoping to attract a new round of investors. "We believed making a demo of a familiar but new game would be our best shot," Zou wrote, "as it allowed us to demonstrate lessons learned in game design and market positioning in the quickest and clearest way possible. So, we channeled our efforts into a new prototype for a new game, Edge of Divinity, that we would pitch for additional funding. Unfortunately, we have not yet been able to secure that funding."

The demo for Edge of Divinity has been made available on Steam if you're interested in checking out another game that'll never make it to completion. It's "a 1–4 player P2P roguelite set in a cosmic world called the Tower" that's designed to have "smoother combat, streamlined game flows, and a deeper progression system than Starlight Re:Volver."

Zou took some time out in his goodbye post to answer questions that have been raised about the studio being funded to the tune of $17.5 million. As Zou explained, "I want to be transparent that the vast majority of those resources went into market rate developer salaries, art, and content production. A little more than half of that total amount went towards the development of Starlight Re:Volver. The remainder went to past and experimental projects, mostly Halcyon Zero."

Halcyon Zero was a prototype version of Starlight Re:Volver, which makes Edge of Divinity the studio's third attempt to crack the multiplayer anime-style action RPG. Which, to be fair, is the kind of game a lot of people would play. They already are, in the form of Genshin Impact and other free-to-play gacha games like it. It's a shame there wasn't room for a paid version of something similar, especially with Starlight Re:Volver's more Sailor Moon-esque art style, and the absence of its earsplitting toddler fairy.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.

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