I think the fate of the Early Access for "The Challenge" had been clear to everyone for a long time (by around 2018, there was already almost no chance of survival), but now I finally want to "put a period on it." Why now? I don't know, it's just... the time has come?

Exactly 9 years ago, on October 7th, 2016, the first public version of "The Challenge" was published on STEAM. We seemed to have everything necessary for success. A great team:

• A talented programmer and 3D modeler, who had released many small games on Unreal Engine and wanted to try something bigger.

• A musician and a professional writer of science fiction.

• A marketer with experience in released games.

We had an interesting idea for a sci-fi plot, where relying on time and space travel made it easy to assemble various locations with completely different settings.

We had faith in ourselves and a ton of enthusiasm!

With the initial momentum, we put together a small build that, I think, looked great 9 years ago and roughly outlined what we wanted to achieve in the end.

The path to success seemed quite realistic, and we had several options to achieve it:

1) Try to secure significant funding for development and advertising from investors.

2) Fund further development by selling the "Early Access" version of the game on STEAM and gradually expanding our game with each new build.

3) Create a KickStarter page, come up with some interesting bonuses for backers, and finance at least part of the development that way.

So what could have gone wrong?

Unfortunately... everything did.

We barely made it to the final showcase before securing investments, but it turned out that the current development stage was too early for them. If I remember correctly, we were offered to try again a year later, but that never materialized. That was probably the most serious blow for us. Simultaneously, the game didn't attract much attention from players on STEAM. And we never even made it to KickStarter in the end. The development team went their separate ways, and everyone moved on to their own things...

What happens next? I think the current version of the game will go on one last major sale with the maximum discount, so that everyone who for some reason wants to buy it can do so. After that, we will remove the game's page from STEAM, and the game will no longer be available for purchase.

Thank you to the people who participated in the development and helped us. I hope you are fine! Thank you to the players who were interested in the idea and believed in this project. It's sad that it ended this way, but there's nothing to be done now...

“The phoenix must burn to emerge.”

— Janet Fitch, White Oleander