It is with much sadness that I must announce the passing of Automation games, the makers of Deceit, and also the 1000-player battle royale game Mavericks: Proving Grounds. It was announced yesterday that they have been placed under administration for financial reasons. You can read the official announcement here.
Apparently Deceit has already been bought by another developer, which is good news for fans of this game. Mavericks, however, is a whole different story. The game is particularly epic in scale, and is based on SpatialOS, which was supposed to allow the 1000 players in one game. The problem is, there would never be 1000 players in one game anyway, and so they were never able to properly test it.
Also, instead of going “alpha” like most games, Automation went for what they called “The Forge”. The Forge is basically a free for all (called “exploration phase”) with occasional tests of various features. This probably led to a fair bit of disenchantment and a lot of people probably thought nothing would ever come of it.
The good news is that there are rumours that the IP has been bought by one of their investors (possibly Improbable, the developers of SpatialOS), and that some of the developers of the game have been hired by the investor. It is also rumored that a version of the game might appear in 2020, released by this investor. Whether it will encapsulate the vision that Automation had originally, we don’t know, but hopefully those of us who supported the game with our hard earned monies might still get something out of it.
As far as I can tell, there is no money, so there wont be any refunds for founders like myself. Would I do it again? Yes, the vision for the game and what they had done so far was really good, unfortunately NDAs meant we couldn’t create any content. Mostly, I am sorry for the employees who stand to lose their jobs.
Bugger.
– Geoff Gummer
